If he’d been at home, he’d have thought: Dump Plant Injuries. In the socially unbalanced, pioneer cities of the Martian Equatorial Ring, little scavengers tangled with the recycling machinery. They needed premium, Earthatmosphericpressure nursing, which they didn’t get; or the flesh would not regenerate. So the gouges and dents were permanent: skinned over, like the scars on the police chief’s forearms; visible through thin clothing, like the depressions in her thighs. But this wasn’t Mars, and she wasn’t human, she was a Ki. He guessed, uneasily, at more horrifying forms of childhood poverty.
She seemed very young for her post: hardly more than a girl. She could almost have been a human girl with gene-mods. Could have chosen to adopt that fine pelt of silky bronze, glimmering against the bare skin of her palms, her throat and face. Chosen those eyes, like drops of black dew; the hint of a mischievous animal muzzle. Her name was Ki-anna, and she represented the KiAn authorities. Her partner, a Shet called Roaaat Bhvaaan, his heavy uniform making no concession to the warmth of the space-habitat, was from Interplanetary Affairs, and represented Speranza. The Shet looked far more alien: a head like a grey boulder, naked wrinkled hide hooding his eyes.
Patrice didn’t expect them to be on his side, this odd couple, polite and sympathetic as they seemed. He must be careful, he must remember that his mind and body were still reeling from the Buonarotti Transit – two instantaneous interstellar transits in two days, the first in his life. He’d never seen a non-human sentient biped in person, this time last week; and here he was in a stark, police interview room with two of them.
“You learned of your sister’s death a Martian year ago?”
“Her disappearance. Yes.”
Ki-anna watched, Bhvaaan questioned. Patrice wished it were the other way round. He dreaded the Speranza mind-set. Anyone who lives on a planet is a lesser form of life, of course we’re going to ignore your appeals, but it’s more fun to ignore them slowly, very, very slowly –
“We can agree she disappeared,” muttered the Shet, what might be mordant humour tugging the lipless trap of his mouth. “Yet, aaah, you didn’t voice your concerns at once?”
“Lione is, was, my twin. We were close, however far… When the notification of death came it was very brief, I didn’t take it in. A few days later I collapsed at work, I had to take compassionate leave.”
At first he’d accepted the official story. She’s dead, Lione is dead. She went into danger, it shouldn’t have happened but it did, on a suffering war-torn planet unimaginably far away…
The Shet rolled his neckless head, possibly in sympathy.
“You’re aahh, Social Knowledge Officer. Thap must be a demanding job. No blame if a loss to your family caused you to crash-out.”
“I recovered. I examined the material that had arrived while I was ill: everything about my sister’s last expedition, and the investigation. I knew there was something wrong. I couldn’t achieve anything at a distance. I had to get to Speranza, I had to get myself here –”
“Quite right, child. Can’t do anything at long distance, aaah.”
“I needed financial support, and the system is slow. The Buonarotti Transit network isn’t for people like me –” He wished he’d bitten that back. “I mean, it’s for officials, diplomats, not civilian planet-dwellers.”
“Unless they’re idle super-rich,” rumbled the Shet. “Or refugees getting shipped out of a hellhole, maybe. Well, you persisted. Your sister was Martian too. What was she doing here?”
Patrice looked at the very slim file on the table. No way of telling if that tablet held a ton of documents or a single page.
“Don’t you know?”
“Explain to us,’ said Ki-anna. Her voice was sibilant, a hint of a lisp.
“Lione was a troposphere engineer. She was working on the KiAn Atmosphere Recovery Project. But you must know…” They waited, silently. “All right. The KiAn war practically flayed this planet. The atmosphere’s being repaired, it’s a major Speranza project. Out here it’s macro-engineering. They’ve created a – a kind of membrane, like a casting mould, of magnetically charged particles. They’re shepherding small water-ice asteroids and other debris with useful constituents, through it; into a zone around the planet. Controlled annihilation releases the gases, bonding and venting propagates the right mix. Martians pioneered the technique. We’ve enriched our own atmosphere the same way… but nothing like the scale of this. The job also has to be done from the bottom up. The troposphere, the lowest level of the inner atmosphere, is alive. It’s a saturated fluid full of viruses, fragments of DNA and RNA, amino acids; metabolising mineral traces, pre-biotic chemistry. The mix is unique to a living planet, and it’s like the mycorrhizal systems in the soil, back on Earth. If it isn’t there, or it’s not right, nothing will thrive.”
He couldn’t tell if they knew all this, or didn’t understand a word.
“The tropo reconstruction wasn’t going well. Lionel found out there was an area of the surface, under the An-lalhar Lakes, where the living layer might be undamaged. This – where we are now – is the Orbital Refuge Habitat for that region. She came out here, determined to get permission from the Ruling An to collect samples –”
Ki-anna interrupted softly. “Isn’t the surviving troposphere remotely sampled by Project automats, all over the planet?”
“Yes, but obviously not well enough. That was Lione. If it was her responsibility she had to do everything in her power to get the job done.”
“Aah. Raarpht… Your sister befriended the Ruling An, she gained permission, she went down, she stepped on a landmine. You understand that there was no body to be recovered? She was vaporised?”
“So I was told.”
Ki-anna rubbed her scarred forearms; the Shet studied Patrice. The room was haunted by Transit ghosts, shadowy with secret intent –
“Aaap. You need to make a ‘pilgrimage’. A memorial journey?”
“No, it’s not like that. There’s something wrong.”
The shadows were tight, the two aliens had made up their minds already: but were they for him or against him?
“Lione disappeared. I don’t speak any KiAn language; I didn’t have to, the reports were in English: and when I needed more detail there are translator bots. I have not missed anything. A vaporised body does not vanish. All that tissue, blood and bones, leaves forensic traces. None. No samples were recovered. She was there to collect samples, so don’t tell me it was forbidden. She didn’t come back, that’s all I know. Something happened to her, something other than a warzone accident…”
“Are you saying your sister was murdered, Patrice?”
“I need to go down there.”
“I can see you’d feel thap way. You realise KiAn is uninhabitable?”
“A lot of places on Mars are called uninhabitable. My work takes me to the worst-off regions. I can handle myself.”
“Aaap. How do you feel about the KiAn issue, Messer Ferringhi?”
Patrice opened his mouth, and shut it. He didn’t have a prepared answer for that one. “I don’t know enough.”
The Shet and the Ki looked at each other, for the first time. He felt they’d been through the motions, and they were agreeing to quit.
“As you know,” rumbled Bhvaan, “the Ruling An must give permission. The An-he will see you?”
“I have an appointment.”
“Then thap’s all for now. Enjoy your transit hangover in peace.”
Patrice Ferringhi took a moment, looking puzzled, before he realised he could go. He stood, hesitated, gave an odd little bow and left the room. The Shet and the Ki relaxed somewhat.
“Collapsed at work,” said Roaaat Bhvaan. “Thap’s not good.”
“We can’t all be made of stone, Shet.”
“Aaah well. Cross fingers, Chief.”
They were resigned to strange English figures of speech. The language of Speranza, of diplomacy, was also the language of interplanetary policing. You became fluent, or you relied on unreliable transaid, and you screwed up.
“And all my toes,” said the Ki.
On his way to his cabin, Patrice found an Ob-bay. He stared into a hollow sphere, permeated by the star-pricked darkness of KiAn system space: the limb of the planet obscured; the mainstar and the blue ‘daystar’ out of sight. Knurled objects flew around, suddenly making endless field-beams visible. One lump rushed straight at him, growing huge, and seemed to miss the ob-bay by centimetres, with a roar like monstrous thunder. The big impacts were close enough to make this Refuge shake. He’d felt that, already. Like the Gods throwing giant furniture about –
He could not get over the fact that nothing was real. Everything had been translated here by the Buonarotti Torus, as pure data. This habitat, this shipboard jumper he wore; this body. All made over again, out of local elements, as if in a 3D printer… The scarred Ki woman fascinated him, he hardly knew why. The portent he felt in their meeting (had he really met her, or just been in the same room?) was what they call a ‘transit hangover’.
He must sleep it off.
The Ki-anna was rated Chief of Police, but she walked the beat most days. All her officers above nightstick grade were seconded from the Ruling An’s Household Guard: she didn’t like to impose on them. The Ki – natural street-dwellers, if ever life was natural again – melted indoors as she approached. Her uniform, backed by Speranza, should have made the refugees feel safe: but not one of them trusted her. The only people she could talk to were the habitual criminals. They appreciated the Ruling An’s strange appointment. She made her rounds, visiting nests where law-abiding people better stay away.
The gangsters knew a human had ‘joined the station’. They were very curious. She sniffed the wind and lounged with the idlers, giving up Patrice Ferringhi in scraps, a resource to be conserved. The pressure of the human’s strange eyes was still with her –
No one ought to look at her scars like that, it was indecent.
But he was an alien, he didn’t know how to behave.
She didn’t remember being chosen – for the treatment that would render her flesh delectable, while ensuring that what happened wouldn’t kill her. She only knew she’d been sold (tradition called it an honour) so that her littermates could eat. She would always wonder, why me? What was wrong with me? We were very poor, I understand that, but why me?
It had all been for nothing, anyway. Her parents and her littermates were dead, along with everyone else. So few survivors! A handful of die-hards on the surface. A token few Ki taken to live in Speranza, in the staggeringly distant Blue System. Would they ever return? The Ki-anna thought not… Six Refuge Habitats in orbit. And of course some of the Heaven-born, who’d seen what was coming, had escaped to Balas or to Shet before the war broke out.
At curfew she filed a routine report and retired to her quarters in the Curtain Wall. Roaaat, who was sharing her living space, was already at home. It was lucky that Shet didn’t normally like to sit in Speranza-style ‘chairs’: he’d have broken a hole in her ceiling. His bulk, as he lay at ease, dwarfed her largest room. They compared notes.
“All the Refuges have problems,” said the Ki-anna. “But I get the feeling I have more than my share. Extortion, intimidation, theft and violence –”
“We can grease the wheels,’ said Roaat. ‘Strictly off the record, we can pay your villains off. It’s distasteful, not the way to do police work.”
‘But expedient.’
“Aaap… He seemed very taken with you,” said Roaaat.
“The human…? I didn’t notice.”
“Thap handsome Blue, yaaas. I could smell pheromones.”
“He isn’t a ‘Blue’’ said the Ki-anna. “The almighty Blues rule Speranza. The humans left behind on Earth, or on ‘Mars’ – What is ‘Mars’? Is it a moon?’
“Noope. A smaller planet in the Blue system.”
“Well, they aren’t Blues, they’re just ordinary aliens.”
“I shall give up matchmaking. You don’t appreciate my help… Let’s hope the An-he finds your ordinary alien more attractive.”
The Ki-anna shivered. “I think he will. He’s a simple soul.”
Roaaat was an undemanding guest, despite his size. They shared a meal, based on ‘culturally neutral’ Speranza Food Aid. The Shet spread his bedding. The Ki-anna groomed herself, crouched by a screen that showed views of the Warrens. Nothing untoward stirred, in the simulated night. She pressed knuckle-fur to her mouth. Sometimes the pain of living, haunted by the uncounted dead, became very hard to bear. Waking from every sleep to remember afresh that there was nothing left.
“I might yet back out of this, Officer Bhvaaan. What if we only succeed in arousing the monsters, and make bad worse?”
She unfolded her nest, and settled behind him. He patted her side with his clubbed fist – it felt like being clobbered by a kindly rock. “See how it goes. You can back out later.”
The Ki-anna lay sleepless, the bulk of her unacknowledged bodyguard between her and the teeth of the An; wondering about Patrice Ferringhi.
When his appointment with alien royalty came around, Patrice was glad he’d had some breathing space. The world was solid again; he felt in control of himself. He donned his new transaid, settling the pickup against his skull, and set out for the high-security gate that led to the Refugee Habitat itself. Armoured guards, intimidatingly tall, were waiting on the other side. They bent their heads, exhaled breath loudly – and indicated that he was to get into a kind of floating palanquin. Probably they knew no English.
His guards jogged around him in a hollow square; between their bodies he glimpsed the approach to an actual castle, like something in a fantasy game. Like a recreation of Mediaeval Europe or Japan, rising from a mass of basic living modules. It was amazing. He’d never been inside a big space-station before, not counting a few hours in Speranza Transit Port. The false horizon, the lilac sky, arcing far above the castle’s bannered towers, would have fooled him completely, if he hadn’t known.
He met the An-he in a windowless, antique chamber hung with tapestries (at least, tapestries seemed like the right word). Sleekly upholstered couches were scattered over the floor. The guard (different uniform from his palanquin escort), who’d escorted him here backed out, snorting. Patrice looked around, vaguely bothered by a too-warm, indoor breeze. He saw someone almost human, loose-limbed and handsome in Speranza tailoring, reclining on a couch, large, wide-spaced eyes alight with curiosity, and realised he was alone with the king.
“Excuse my steward,’ said the An, ‘he doesn’t speak English well, and doesn’t like to embarrass himself by trying. Please, be at home.”
“Thank you for seeing me,’ said Patrice. ‘Your, er Majesty –?”
The An-he grinned. “You are Patrice. I am the An, let’s just talk.”
The young co-ruler was charming and direct. He asked about the police. Patrice noted, disappointed, that Ki-anna was a title, the Ki-she, or something. He wondered how you learned their personal names.
“It was a brief interview,” he admitted, ruefully. “I got the impression they weren’t very interested.”
“Well, I am interested. Lione was a friend to my people. To both my peoples. I’m not sure I understand, were you partners, or litter-mates?”
“We were twins, that means litter-mates, but partners’ too, though our careers took different directions.”
He needed to get the word partner into the conversation. The An partnership wasn’t sexual, but it was lifelong, and the closest social and emotional bond they knew. A lost partner justified his appeal. The An-he touched his discreet headset (he was using a transaid, too); reflexively.
“A double loss, poor Patrice. Please do confide in me, it will help enormously if you are completely frank –”
In this pairing, the An-she was the senior. She made the decisions, but Patrice couldn’t meet her, she was too important. He could only work on the An-he, who would (hopefully) promote his cause. He had the eerie thought that he was doing exactly what Lione had done – trying to make a good impression on this alien aristocrat, maybe in this very room. The tapestries (if that was the word) swam and rippled in the moving air, drawing his attention to scenes he really didn’t want to examine. Brightly dressed lords and ladies gathered for the hunt. The game was driven onto the guns. The butchery, the bustling kitchen scenes, the banquet –
He realised, horrified, that his host had asked him something about his work on Mars, and he hadn’t heard the question.
“Oh,” said the An-he, easily. “I see what you’re looking at. Don’t be offended, it’s all in the past, and priceless, marvellous art. Recreated, sadly. The originals were destroyed, along with the original of this castle. But still, our heritage! Don’t you Blues love ancient battle scenes, heaps of painted slaughter? And by the way, aren’t you closely related, limb for limb and bone for bone, to the beings that you traditionally kill and eat?”
“Not on Mars.”
“There, you are sundered from your web of life. At home on Earth, the natural humans do it all the time, I assure you.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
Notoriously, the Ki and the An had both been affronted when they were identified, by other sentient bipeds, as a single species. Of course they knew that: but what an indecent topic! In ways, the most disturbing aspect of the whole ‘KiAn issue’ was not a genocidal war, in which the oppressed had risen up savagely against the oppressors. It was the fact that some respected Ki leaders defended ‘the traditional diet of the An’.
The An-he showed his bright white teeth. “Then you have an open mind, my dear Patrice! It gives me hope that you’ll come to understand us.” He stretched, and exhaled noisily. “Enough. All I can tell you today is that your request is being considered. You’re a valuable person, and it’s dangerous down there! We don’t want to lose you. Now, I suppose you’d like to see your sister’s rooms? She stayed with us, you know: here in the castle.”
“Would that be possible?”
“Certainly! I’ll get some people to take you.”
More guards, or servants in military-looking uniform, led him along winding, irregular corridors, all plagued by that insistent breeze, and opened a round plug of a doorway. The An-he’s face appeared, on a display screen emblazoned on a guard’s tunic.
“Take as long as you like, dear Patrice. Don’t be afraid of disturbing the evidence! The police took anything they thought was useful, ages ago.”
The guards shut the door and stayed outside: giving him privacy, which he had not expected. He was alone, in his sister’s space. The aeons he’d crossed, the ungraspable interstellar distance, vanished. Lione was here. He could feel her, all around him. The warm air, suddenly still, seemed full of images: glimpses of his sister, rushing into his mind –
‘Recreation’ was skin-deep here. The room was essentially identical to his cabin. A bed-shelf with a puffy mattress; storage space beneath. A desk, and a closet bathroom, stripped of fittings. Her effects had been returned to Mars, couriered as data. The police had been and gone ‘ages ago’. What could this empty box tell him? Nothing, but he had to try.
Was he under surveillance? He decided he didn’t care.
He searched swiftly and carefully: studying the floor, running his hands over walls and closet space; checking the seals on the mattress. The screen above the desk was set in an ornate decorative frame. He probed around it, and his fingertips brushed something that had slipped behind. Patiently, he teased out a corner of the object, and drew it from hiding.
Lione, he whispered. He tucked his prize inside the breast of his shipboard jumper, and knocked on the round door. It opened; the guards were waiting outside.
“I’m ready to leave now.”
The An-he looked out of the tunic display again. “By all means! But don’t be a stranger. Come and see me again, come often!”
That evening he searched the little tablet’s drive for his own name; for any message. He tried every password of theirs he could remember: found nothing, and was heartbroken. He barely noted the actual content. Next day, to his great surprise, he was recalled to the castle. He met the An-he as before, and learned that the Ruling An would like to approve his mission, but the police were making difficulties.
“Speranza doesn’t mind having a touching tragedy associated with their showcase Project,” said the young king wryly. “A scandal would be far worse, so they don’t want to risk you finding anything inconvenient. My partner and I feel you have a right to investigate, but we’re meeting resistance.”
There was nothing Patrice could do, and at least it wasn’t a refusal. If the alien royals were on his side, hopefully the police would have to give in. Back in his cabin, he examined the tablet again… Lione had been making a private, unofficial record of her thoughts on ‘the KiAn issue’.
KiAn isn’t like other worlds of the Diaspora. They didn’t have a Conventional Space Age before First Contact. But they weren’t primitives when ‘we’ found them, nor even Mediaeval. The An of today are what remains of a planetary superpower. They were always the Great Nation, and the many nations of the Ki were their subjects, through millennia of civilisation. But it was no more than fifteen hundred standard years ago, when, in a time of famine, the An or ‘Heaven Born’ first began to hunt and eat the ‘Earth Born’ Ki. They don’t do that anymore. They have painless processing plants (or did). They have retail packaging –
Cannibalism happens. It’s known in every sentient and pre-sentient biped species. What developed on KiAn is different, and the so-called ‘atavists’ are not really ‘atavist’. This isn’t the survival, as some on Speranza would like to believe, of an ancient, preconscious symbiosis. The An and the Ki were not animals, when this ‘stable genocide’ began. They were people, who could think and feel. People, like us.
The entry was text-only, but he heard his sister’s voice: forthright, uncompromising. She must have forced herself to be more tactful with the An-he! The next entry was video: Lione talking to him, living and breathing. Inside the slim case, when he opened it, he’d found pressed fragments of a moss, or lichen. Shards of it clung to his fingers, it smelled odd, but not unpleasant. He sniffed his fingertips, painfully happy.
Days passed, in a rhythm of light and darkness that belonged to the planet ‘below’. Patrice shuttled between the Station’s visitors quarters, where he was the only guest, and the An castle. He didn’t dare refuse a summons, but he declined all dinner invitations: which made the An laugh. The odd couple, the Shet and the Kianna, meanwhile showed no interest in Patrice at all, and did not return his calls.
He might have tried harder to get their attention, but there was Lione’s journal. He didn’t want to hand it over; or to lie about it either.
Once, as they walked in the castle’s galleries, the hot breeze nagging at him as usual, Patrice felt he was being watched. He looked up. From a high, curtained balcony a wide-eyed, narrow face was looking down intently. “That was the An-she,” murmured his companion, stooping to exhale the words in Patrice’s ear. “She likes you, or she wouldn’t have let you glimpse her… I tell her all about you.”
“I didn’t really see anything,” said Patrice, wary of causing offence. “The breeze is so strong, tossing the curtains about.”
“I’m afraid we’re obsessed with air circulation, in this crowded accommodation. There are aliens about, who don’t smell very nice.”
“I’m very sorry! I had no idea!”
“Oh no, Patrice, not you. You smell fresh and sweet.”
Lione’s entries weren’t dated, but they charted a progress. He started to be afraid he’d find her actually defending industrial cannibalism. But that never happened. Instead, as he immersed himself, he knew his twin was asking him not to accept, but to understand –
Consider chattel slavery. We look on the buying and selling of sentient bipeds, as if they were livestock, with revulsion. Who could question that? Then think of the intense bond between a beloved master, or mistress, and a beloved servant. A revered commanding officer and devoted troops. Must this relationship go too? The An and the Ki know their way of life must change. But there is a deep equality in their ‘exchange of being’, which we individualists can’t recognise –
Patrice thought of the Ki-Anna’s scars.
The ‘deep equality’ entry was almost the last. The journal ended abruptly, with no sense of closure.
Lione’s incense (he’d decided the ‘lichen’ was a kind of KiAn incense, perhaps a present from the An-he) filled his cabin with its subtle perfume. He closed the tablet, murmuring words he knew by heart a deep equality in their exchange of being, and decided to turn in. In his tiny bathroom, for a piercing moment it was Lione he saw in the mirror. A dark-skinned, light-eyed, serious woman, with the aquiline bones of their North African ancestry. His other self, who had left him so far behind –
The journal was a message. It called him to follow her, and he didn’t yet know, didn’t dare to guess, where his passionate journey would end.
When he learned that he had a permit to visit the surface, but the Ki-anna and the Shet were coming with him, he understood that the Ruling An had been forced to make this concession – and the bargaining was over. He just wished he knew why the police had insisted on escorting him. To help Patrice to discover the truth? Or to prevent him?
He didn’t find out because he didn’t meet the odd couple until they embarked together, in full protective gear: quarantine-film coated bodies under soft-shell life-support suits. The noisy shuttle bay put a damper on conversation, and the flight was no more sociable. Patrice spent it in an escape capsule, breathing tanked air: the police insisted on this. He saw nothing of KiAn until he was crunching across the seared rubble of a landing field. The landscape was dry tundra, like Martian desert colour-shifted into shades of grey and green. Armed Green Belts were waiting, with a landship and all-terrain hardsuits for the visitors.
“The An-he offered me a military escort,” said Patrice, when his freedom of speech was restored by helmet radio. “What was wrong with that?”
“Sorry,” grunted Bhvaaan. “Couldn’t be allowed.”
The Ki-anna said nothing. He remembered the way he’d felt at their meeting. There had been a connection on her side too: he was sure of it. Now she was just another bulky Speranza doll, on a smaller scale than her partner. As if she’d read his thoughts, she cleared her faceplate and looked out at him, curiously. He wanted to tell her that he understood KiAn, better than she could imagine… but not with Bhvaaan around.
“You’ve been keeping yourself to yourself, Messer Ferringhi.’
“I could say the same of you two, Officer Bhvaaan.”
“Aaaap. But you made friends with the An-he?”
“The Ruling An were very willing to help me.”
“We’ve been working in your interest too,” said the Ki-anna.
She pivoted her suit to look through the windowband in the landship’s flank. “Far below this plateau, back that way, was the regional capital; there were fertile plains, rich forests, towns and fields and parklands. ‘The ‘Roof of Heaven’ itself was never beautiful. It’s strange, but this part hardly seems much changed –”
“Except that one dare not breathe,” she added, sadly.
On the shore of the largest ice sheet, the Lake of Heaven, the odd couple and Patrice disembarked. The Ki-anna led the way to a great low arch of rock-embedded ice. The Green Belts had stayed in the ship.
Everything was livid mist. “We’re going under An-lalhar Lake alone?” Patrice was startled.
“The Green Belts will be on call,” said the Ki-anna. “Below the lake, it’s not their jurisdiction. It’s a treasured enclave where Ki and the An are stubbornly dying together.”
Bhvaaan peered at him. “It’s not our jurisdiction either, Messer Ferringhi. If we meet with violence, then we can call for help, but thap’s after the event. The people under the Lake don’t have a lot to lose and their mood is volatile. Bear thap in mind. “
“I could have had an escort they’d respect.”
“You’re better off with us.”
They descended a tunnel. The light never grew less; on the contrary it grew brighter. When they emerged, the Heaven Lake was above them: a mass of blue-white radiance, indigo shadowed, shot through with rainbow. It was extraordinarily beautiful; it seemed impossible that the ice had captured so much light from the poisoned smog. Far off, in the centre of the glacial depression, geothermal vents made a glowing spiderweb of fire and snowy steam. Patrice checked his telltales, and eagerly began to release his helmet. The Shet dropped a gauntleted fist on his arm.
“Don’t do it, child. Look at your rads.”
“A moment won’t kill me. I want to feel KiAn –”
The odd couple, hidden in their gear, seemed to look at him strangely.
“Maybe later,” said the Ki-anna. “It’s safer in the Grottos, where your sister was headed.”
“How do we get there?”
“We walk,” rumbled Bhvaaan. “No vehicles. There’s not much growing but it’s still a sacred park. Let your suit do the work and keep up your fluids.”
“Thanks, I know how to handle a hard shell.”
They walked in file. The desolation; the ruined beauty that had been revered by both ‘races’, caught at Patrice’s heart. His helmet display counted rads, paces, heartrate: and counted down the metres. Thirty kilometres to the place where Lione had last been seen alive.
“Which faction mined the Lake of Heaven parkland?”
“To our knowledge? Nobody did, child.”
It was a question he’d asked over and over: far away, when he still thought he could get answers. Now he asked and didn’t care. Landmines could be denied. In the chaos of a war zone’s emissions who could be sure? He walked between them, the Shet ahead, the Ki-anna behind. His pace was steady, yet the helmet display said his body was pumping adrenalin: not from fear, he knew, but in the grip of intense excitement. He sucked on glucose, and tried to calm himself.
As the radiance above them dimmed they reached the Grotto domain. Rugged rocky pillars upheld the roof of ice: widely spaced at first then clustering towards a centre that could not be seen. Here there was a Ki community, surviving in rad-proofed modules. The Ki-anna was allowed to enter the warren. Patrice and the Shet waited, in the darkening, blighted landscape. She emerged after an hour or so.
“We can’t go on without guides, and we can’t have guides until morning. At the earliest. They have to think it over.”
“They weren’t expecting us?”
“They were. They know all about it, but I think they may have had fresh instructions. They’re in full communication with the castle: there’s some sophisticated kit in there. We’ll just have to wait.”
“Do they remember Lione?’ demanded Patrice, hardly listening to the delaying tactics. ‘I have transaid, I want to talk to someone.”
“Not now. I’ll ask tomorrow.”
“Will they lep us sleep indoors?” asked the Shet.
“No.”
The Shet and the Ki-anna made camp, using their suits to clear ground and construct a shelter in the ruins of the former village. Patrice left them to it, and went over to a heap of boulders; where he’d noticed patches of familiar lichen. He’d brought some fragments of Lione’s incense with him in a First Aid pouch, in the sleeve pocket of his inner. The police were fully occupied. Furtively he opened the arm of his hardshell, and fished the pouch out. Yes, it seemed exactly the same –
Had Lione stood where he was standing now? Was the incense not a gift, but a souvenir she had gathered? He felt convinced that this was so. She had been standing right here, and his need was irresistible. He released his face-plate, stripped his gauntlets, rubbed away quarantine film. KiAn rushed in on him, cold, harsh and intoxicating in his throat –
“What is that?”
The Ki-anna was right behind him. “A lichen sample,” said Patrice, caught out. “Or that’s what I’d call it at home. It was in my sister’s room, in the An Castle, but I think it came from here. Look, they’re the same!”
“Not quite,” said the Ki-anna. “Yours is a cultivated variety.”
He thought she’d be angry, maybe accuse him of concealing evidence. To his astonishment she took his bared hand, and bowed over it until her cheek brushed the vulnerable inner skin of his wrist. Her touch was a huge shock, sweet and profoundly sexual. She made him dizzy.
This can’t be happening, he thought. I’m here for Lione –
“I don’t know your name.”
“We don’t do that,” she whispered, equally moved.
“I felt, I can’t describe it, the moment I met you –”
“I’d better keep this. You must get your gloves and helmet back on.”
“But I want KiAn –”
Gently, she released his hand. “You’ve had enough.”
The shelter was a snug fit. When they were sealed inside, the odd couple set aside a pack of ‘viands’ the An-he had provided, and shared out basic rations, with fresh water they’d brought from the Habitat.
They would sleep in their suits. Patrice lay down at once, to escape their questions and be alone with his confusion. He was here for Lione, here to join Lione. How could he and the Ki-anna suddenly feel this way?
“Were you getting romantic, with Patrice, over by those rocks?” asked Bhvaaan. “Sniffing his pheromones?”
“No,” said the Ki-anna softly, grimly. “Something else.” She showed him the First Aid pouch and its contents.
“Mighty Void!”
“He says he found it hidden in the room Lione used, in the castle.”
“We took that cabin apart.” The Shet’s delicates unfolded from his club of a fist. He turned the clear pouch around, probing the find with sensitive tentacles. “So thaap’s how, so thaap’s how –”
“So that’s how the cookie was crumbled,” agreed the Ki-anna.
“What do you suggest, Chief? Abort, and get out of here quickly?”
“If we run, and they have heavy weaponry, we’re at their mercy. I see what it looks like, but I think we should show no alarm.”
“I have had thoughts,’ she admitted, looking at the dim outline of Patrice Ferringhi. ‘Don’t know why. It’s something in his eyes.”
“Thaap’s the way it starts,” said the Shet. “Thoughts. Then wondering if anything can come of them. They say sentient bipeds are attracted to each other like… like brothers and sisters, long separated. Well, I’ll talk to the Greenies. And you and I had better not sleep.”
The suit was a house the shape of her body. She sat in it, wondering about sexual pleasure: pleasure with Patrice. What would it be like? She had only one strange comparison, but that didn’t frighten her… What Roaaat Bhvaaan offered was far more disturbing.
She glimpsed the abyss, and fell into a syrupy oblivion.
Patrice dreamed he was in a strolling crowd, among bronze and purple trees with branches that swayed in the warm breeze. He was in the KiAn Orientation, a virtual reality. But it had become thickly sinister; the crowd pressed too close, the trees hid what he ought to see.
Then Lione came running up and bit him. He yelled, and shook her off. She came back and bit his thigh, but now he was in the dark, cold and sore. Lione was gone: he was being hunted by fierce hungry animals –
Suddenly he knew he was not asleep.
He was naked. Where was his suit? Where was he? He had no idea. The air was freezing, the darkness almost complete. He stumbled towards a gleam ahead, and entered a rocky cave: ice underfoot, icy stalactites hanging down. A lamp burned incense-scented oil, set on the ground next to something. That’s a body, he thought. He knelt down. It was a human body, freeze-dried. She was curled on her side, turned away from him, but he’d found Lione. She was naked too. Why was she naked?
He raised the lamp and saw where flesh had been cut away: not by teeth, as in his dream, but by sharp knives. She had been partially butchered. He tried to turn her: the body moved all of a piece. Her face was recognisable, calm in death, the eyes sunken; skin like cured leather.
Was she smiling? Oh, Lione –
But why am I naked? he thought. How did I get here? Who brought me?
The Ki entered the cave on soft feet, and surrounded Patrice and his sister. They’d brought more lights. One of them was carrying, carefully, a flattened spherical object, dull grey-green, and the size of Patrice’s fist. It had a seam around the centre, a bevelled cap.
That’s a vapor mine, he thought. There will be no body to recover.
Then the An came. The Ki stepped back, they weren’t here to prevent the banquet, they were here to witness. Patrice screamed. He fought the knives with his bare hands, he kicked out with his bare feet. The An, seeming outraged, bewildered, kept yelling at him in scraps of English to keep still, be easy Blue, you want this, what’s wrong with you?
The Ki-anna and the Shet had ditched their hard shells to search the narrow passages. They arrived armed, but badly outnumbered and couldn’t get near Patrice, who was still fighting, but bleeding profusely –
“I was the Earth In Heaven!”, shouted the Chief of Police. “I say that the flesh is not sacred, not yours to take. Let the stranger go!”
She managed to hold the fanatics at bay, made uncertain by her status, until the Green Belts finally arrived. Luckily Bhvaaan had summoned them, when the Ki-anna followed Patrice into that drugged sleep, and before he succumbed himself.
Patrice’s injuries were not dangerous. As soon as he was allowed he signed himself out of medical care and insisted on talking to the police again. He met the odd couple in the same bare interview room as before.
“I need to withdraw the statement I made at the scene. I’m sorry, but can’t press charges.”
If next of kin didn’t press charges, KiAn law made it difficult for Interplanetary Affairs to prosecute: he knew that, but he had no choice.
“I know the tablet in Lione’s room was planted on me. I know her words – if any of them were genuinely hers – had been rearranged to fool me into accepting atavism. It doesn’t matter. My sister did accept, she wanted to die that way. She gave her body as a sacrifice, for peace. She was my twin: I can’t explain, but I have to respect her wishes.”
“A beautiful, consensual ritual,” remarked the Shet. “Yaap. That’s what the cannibal die-hards always say. But if you scratch any of these halfway ‘respectable’ atavists, such as our Ruling An pair here –”
“You find the meat-packing industry,” said the Ki-anna.
Patrice heard the blinkered, Speranza mindset.
“No. My sister was willing. I know she was.”
“I believe it.” To his confusion the Ki-anna reached out, took his injured hand and held his wrist, where the blood ran, to her face. The same sweet, intimate gesture as on KiAn. “So are you, willing; a little, even now. It’ll wear off.”
She dropped his hand and placed an evidence bag, containing his First Aid pouch and the scraps of lichen, on the table.
“In English the common name of this herb, or lichen, would be “Willingness”. It grows naturally only under the Lake of Heaven. Long ago it was known as a powerful aphrodisiac, but the labwork kind has a different use. It’s given to a child chosen to be Ki-anna, which means sold to the An as a living meat source. It’s a dainty form of cannibalism, practiced in my region. A drugged child, a willing victim, with a strong resistance to infection and trauma, is eaten alive, by refined degrees. If a child like that survives to adulthood, they are free; the debt is paid.
The Ki-anna showed her teeth. “I made it, as you see, but I haven’t forgotten that scent. When I smelled your flesh, under the Lake, I knew you’d been treated for butchery – and then I understood. The An-pair here drugged Lione until she was delirious with joy at the prospect of being eaten, and sent her to the atavist fanatics under An-lalhar, for a political purpose. Then later they tried the same trick on you.”
Bhvaaan tapped the casefile tablet with his delicates. “Your sister died too quickly, that was the problem.”
“What do you mean –?”
“We couldn’t prove it, but we knew they’d killed her, Messer Ferringhi. We also knew, thanks to the Chief here and her work in the Refuge, who was pulling the strings; and how prohibited ordnance was smuggled into the Grottos. Your sister had fallen into a trap. She was determined to get herself under the Heaven Lake, and thaap suited the atavists just fine. It would have been a powerful message. A Speranza scientist ritually eaten, and then consumed by the very air of KiAn –”
“Controlled annihilation,” whispered Patrice. “That’s what I saw, in the cave. I understood it when I saw the vapor mine –”
“Thaap was the idea. The atavists want to bring back the meat factories, soon as their planet has an atmosphere again. Your sister’s death was going to help them: except it didn’t work out. You were right about the tropo sampling, young Blue. There’s also stringent military activity monitoring. If a mine had gone off under the Lake, believe me, we’d know. If a human-sized body had been atomised; we’d know. So the ‘consummation’ hadn’t happened, and we couldn’t figure it out. Now we think we know the answer. She died too quickly. She had to be vaporised alive, because a dead body can’t be willing. But she wasn’t a Ki, and they hit an artery or something.”
Patrice had turned strangely grey in the face.
“You going to crash out, child –?”
“No, go on –”
The Shet rearranged his bulk on the inadequate office chair. “The autopsy’ll tell us the details, anyway. Then you came along, Patrice. We saw a chance to get ourselves to the crime scene – and wasted Diaspora funds pushing on an open door. And you nearly died, because we drank the nice fresh water from thiip Habitat. Which happened to be doped –”
“The atavists thought the willingness they’d cooked up for Lione would work just the same on you,” said the Ki-anna. “They’ve never heard of fraternal twins. Ki litter-mates can be of any sex, yet we are all what you call, er, genetically identical. You were begging to be lured to the Grottos: it was perfect, you would replace Dr Ferringhi. But you and your sister were not clones. The drug affected you, but didn’t make you thrilled to be butchered. You fought for your life.”
“You see, Messer Ferringhi,” said Bhvaaan, “whaap really happened here is that a pair of mass-murdering atavist bastards thought they’d appoint themselves a Chief of Police who as a child had been eaten. A girl like that, they calculated, would never dare to do them any damage. Instead they found they had a tiger by the tail…”
He opened the casefile tablet, and pushed it over to Patrice. “They’re glamorous, the Atavist An. But your sister wouldn’t have fallen for them in her right mind, from what I’ve learned. Still want to withdraw this?”
Patrice was silent, eyes down. The Ki-anna saw him shedding the last exaltation of the drug, and taking in everything he’d been told. A new firmness in the lines of his face, a deep sadness as he said farewell to Lione. The human felt her eyes. He looked up and she saw another farewell, sad but final, to something that had barely begun –
“No,” he said. ‘I don’t. But I should go through it again. Can we do that now?”
The Ki-anna returned to her quarters. Roaaat joined her in a while. She sat by her window on the streets, small chin on her silky paws, and didn’t look round when he came in.
“He’ll be fine. What will you do? You’ll have to leave, after this.”
“I know. Leave or get killed, and I must not get killed.”
“You could go with Patrice, see what Mars is like.”
“I don’t think so. The pheromones are no more, now that he knows what making love to the Ki-anna is supposed to be like.”
“I’ve no idea what making love to you is supposed to be like. But you’re a damned fine investigator. Why don’t you come to Speranza?”
Yes, she thought. I knew all along what you were offering. Banishment, not only from my own world but from all the worlds. Never to be a planet-dweller any more. And again I want to ask, why me? What did I do? But you believe it is an honour and I think you are sincere.
“Maybe I will.”