Empire of Bones (11 page)

He watched as the tall figure made its way through the overgrown gardens, pushing aside the roses. The butcher-prince left a drift of petals in his wake, red as spilled blood. Tokai watched until he was out of sight, then crossed to the phone and called Tokyo.

3. Kasasatran system

Sirru was still ruffled by the time he reached the sprawl of black-domed buildings that was the Moyshekhali temenos. It seemed that the temenos already had some idea of what had happened.

Everyone was in the central chamber, all talking at once, and the house itself could be heard beneath the hubbub, trying ineffectually to calm down its inhabitants.

Sirru stepped through into a morass of
/protest/doubt/ fulfillment/speculation/
. Bad as Naturals, he thought. He clapped his hands around his throat and said plaintively, "Quiet!
Please
! I can't feel myself think."

"A new colony? Is it possible?"—this from Issari, his clade-sister, always careful with epistemological niceties.

"Yes. More than possible; fact. We have a new
desqusai
colony, a planet named Tekhei. I am to go there, to manage it."

"Tekhei has become active, then?"

"Apparently so."

"This can only be a good thing," Issari exulted, but a wave of doubt rustled around the chamber.

"More problems, you mean."

"The
desqusai are
always the poor relations. Tekhei is worthless, surely. There's nothing there—a handful of miner-als, a couple of seas…"

"Its people are
desqusai
," Issari bristled. "They are kin. We have an obligation to them, as to all our colonies. This is the way it has always been done."

"We need to consolidate here in the inner systems, not out on the shores of the galaxy! And besides, look what happened to Sirru's poor friend. What about Arakrahali?"

That was the last thing Sirru wanted to discuss. "We can debate the matter all we like," he said, before the argument could get under way. "But the
hltaithoi
have decided that I go, and that is that. We'll just have to make the best of the matter and see how we can turn it to our advantage."

"Why should the
hfiaithoi
be the ones who decide?" a small, young voice cried from the back. The thought twinged painfully inside Sirru's neural cortex; his epistemic suppres-sants clamped down.

"Don't hurt us with heresy," Issari snapped. "Have you been missing your suppressants? Do you want the Prescriptors to pay you a visit and cost us a fortune?"

Sirru wondered, fleetingly, whether Tekhei might actually turn out to be more restful than home. The clade grumbled, but more as a matter of course than from any deep sense of vi-olation. Tekhei was a
desqusai
world, after all, and project de-velopment was what the EsMoyshekhali had been designed to do. The family saw his new role as an honor; Sirru did not want to talk about Anarres, and he certainly did not want to mention the possibility that he was being dispatched to Tekhei to get him out of the way.

Once more, his thoughts returned to the tragedy of the Arakrahali colony. What had really happened? He leaned his head against the warm, pulsing wall of the temenos and closed his eyes. The irony was tüat he had.learned very little about Arakrahali, despite all his investigations. On the face of it, EsRavesh had been entirely right: IrEthiverris had fouled things up. The denizens of Arakrahali had succumbed to a virulent and fatal disease, apparently spread through the new communications network. Most of IrEthiverris' own records had been lost, but his
Itfiaith
administrator's dis-patches had survived. Sirru had read them through a dozen times, and he still couldn't decide why they felt so wrong. The
kfiaith
had written clear, succinct accounts, and her increasing frustration with IrEthiverris' mismanagement was palpable. Yet there was something tliat just didn't ring true about those reports…

It occurred to him then that perhaps the
khaith
had lied outright—but that thought hurt Sirru so much that he gasped. His head rang like a bell, and his neural distress trig-gered a surge of implanted suppressants.

Then his serotonin levels balanced out, and he relaxed. It was nearly time for his next implant, but he wouldn't have time to see to that before he left. There would be facilities on the Tekhei depth ship; he'd just have to do it when he got there.

Patiently, Sirru sorted out the logistics of his absence and delegated tasks to various members of the clade. After some thought, he left the encoded documents relating to his Arakrahali investigation with his clade-sister Issari, with in-structions that they were only to be opened if anything went wrong.

"You must have more confidence, Sirru," Issari admon-ished him. "What could possibly go wrong?"

"That's what IrEthiverris said—and look what happened to him. Keep the encoding in a safe place, and don't let anyone else near it." He patted Issari on the shoulder. "I'm relying on you."

"I'll keep it safe," she promised.

By the time Sirru had finished his preparations, the after-noon was already well advanced. He hurried up through the city, heading for the heights and Anarres.

It seemed that the
apsara's
house had been reinstructed for his presence, for it admitted him with only a ripple of protest. Anarres was once more sitting out on the balcony, overlooking the expanse of Khaikurriye. Reinforced by the previous night's activities, her effect on Sirru was immediate and dis-tracting.

"Anarres…" he whispered, trying to retain control of him-self. "Please… Not now." The
apsara's
arms were already around his neck; he nuzzled her throat. "Listen to me: I'm leaving. I—"

But she murmured in his ear, "I know. Word travels fast from the Core. Sirru'ei. I don't want you to go.

Or I want to go with you."

"I couldn't afford to take you, even if they let me," Sirru said, mentally cursing the
'thaithoi
. "It's EsRavesh, isn't it?" He could smell the sour odor of her sudden distaste.

"EsRavesh has peculiar desires. And I told you—he wants exclusivity, to prove how powerful he is. I'm not going to give him that." She undulated against Sirru until he was close to losing control.

"
Anarres
. Listen to me for a minute," he managed to say. "The posting will allow me to enhance my locative. I'll buy up my status once I get back from Tekhei. I'll help you dissolve your affiliations." If EsRavesh didn't manage to sabotage his life first, he thought. He couldn't help adding, on every level: "
I
really like you"
—and could have bitten his tongue. It sounded so juvenile.

"I like you too," Anarres whispered. Then her hand slid beneath his robe, down to the ridges at the base of his stomach, and Sirru abandoned all attempts at rational analysis.

When he left her, Rasasatra's crimson sun was already sinking below the edge of the city and the air was filled with incense, pollen, and dust. The red wind was blowing, bring-ing the scent of the distant desert with it. Sirru tried not to look back. He caught a transport barge at the EsKhattuye dock and sat staring into solidifying air as the barge glided down through the ribbed seed-walls of the city, descending through the locks until they reached the quay for the landing ledge. From here, Sirru took a second barge to the ledge, then waited for the raft to float down like a hot coal.

He stepped on board. The raft checked the verification that he had been given by EsRavesh, and allowed Sirru to strap him-self in. He was not the only passenger. The raft was full of out-workers returning to the depth ships:
khaithoi
and
hessira
, folding their manifold limbs awkwardly into their mesh;
rhakin
disdainful of anyone who wasn't of their own caste. Sirru glanced around and saw that he was the only
desqusai
on board. The thought of being solitary, of leaving the temenos, was sud-denly a frightening one, and he pushed it aside. He thought that he would rather not see his world fall away, so he closed his eyes, but just as the raft was about to break atmosphere he relented. Gazing through the transparent vane, he could see the whole of the city of Khaikurriye, a continent wide, spreading below him. Lights spanned the world, defining the city, and the line of the coast showed him where the temenos lay. The protection of the scale prevented him from spreading dismay and loss through-out the raft, but he watched until Rasasatra fell behind, a dark sphere against the oceans of night.

Once Rasasatra had slipped away, however, the movement of the raft sent Sirru mercifully to sleep. He rocked in the mesh, listening to the raft murmuring to itself. The sound re-minded him of the vine's singing outside Anarres' window, and he smiled, before he remembered that it was likely to be a very long time before he heard that particular song again. He knew he should be preparing himself for translation, marshal-ing his emotional firewalls and trying to puzzle out exactly why he was being sent to Tekhei, but all he could think about was Anarres.

This had to happen now
, Sirru thought, silently cursing his fate. His attraction to Anarres couldn't be just any old sexual arrangement, either, some interclade status-swapping or in-terpretative transaction. This was love.

Sirru sighed, trying to be philosophical.

He was also not especially happy about the prospect of whatever was waiting for him at the other end of the transla-tion plate. Who could have thought that a little colony like Tekhei would ever amount to anything? It reminded him of one of those plants that languished at the end of the terrace, sulking in its pot, growing maybe a claw's length every year and then suddenly, just as you were about to lose patience and throw the thing into the recycler, putting forth some poky lit-tle blossom. Enough to give you hope that the thing might ac-tually do some growing after all.

With a rising sense of disquiet, Sirru remembered IrEthiverris' first communication from the colony of Arakrahali…

…all the locals are peculiarly charmless. Tiny little people with domed heads. Not one of them
evinces even the slightest in-terest in their own project; they all say they're happy as they are. And
the food is
dreadful… Then IrEthiverris had added, heretically:
If the Core wanted these projects to
be managed prop-terly, they should have placed them under decent supervision from the start
… But you'd never get that "decent supervision," Sirru knew, because the
hhaithoi
never wanted to get their hands dirty. Or whatever they'd replaced hands with these days. He remem-bered with distaste EsRavesh's stubby digits pressed against his own, no more than buttons attached to a pad of flesh. Everyone knew perfectly well that the
khaithoi
had sub-sidiaries to do everything for them these days, so why bother with proper fingers? Pure affectation. His head twinged. The suppressants were likely to be wearing low. High time he got another implant.

He glanced through the vane. Stars shimmered and passed as the raft departed the Rasasatran system and steered itself toward the local depth ship, humming all the while. There was a brief, liquid shudder as the raft docked and the mesh dispersed. Wheezing with the sudden change of air, Sirru stepped through the airlock of the shuddering raft and into the labyrinthine bowels of the depth ship. Neurochemical drifts, keyed into his personal DNA, directed him to the translation chambers, and he glided through the silent cells until he reached his destination.

The
hessirei
translator was waiting for him. It sat on its mat with its six attenuated arms undulating around it, as though caught in a wind that Sirru could not feel. It was making a se-ries of complex adjustments to the equipment. Its eyes were like two hot coals, glowing in the smooth darkness of its face. As Sirru watched, it reached out with a prehensile foot and tapped the translation mesh, sending a jangling coil of chemi-cals out into the air. The air became stuffy and hot, thick with synthetic alkaloids. Sirru sat down opposite the
hessirei
and took a deep, slow breath.

Verification.

Sirru delivered this, and the
hessirei
affirmed him.

Remove your robe. If you are wearing scale, please deactivate fully. Lie down.

Sirru did as he was instructed. He felt the mesh close around him—cool, slightly sticky, not unpleasant.

His throat was dry with anticipation. In a few moments, he would lose consciousness. A billion fragments of data would be chan-neled through a quantum relay to the depth ship Eir Sithe, which currently orbited Tekhei.

The depth ship
, Sirru thought, trying to take his mind off what was about to happen to him,
must be
very patient
. It had been waiting for an administrator to come ever since a day sev-eral million years before, when the project engineers had re-turned home from their initiation of First Stage. Eir Sithe had been stationed outside the Tekhei system ever since, occasion-ally grazing off sunlight and whatever nutrients might come its way, using its light-veil to hide its presence from whoever might have the technology to glimpse it, but mostly sleeping.

Sirru's last thought, before his Second Body was recon-structed inside the translation chamber on Eir Sithe, was whether the ship would be pleased to see him.

4. Mumbai

One of the rebels, braver or more foolish than the rest, leaped onto the battlements of the ancient fort and brandished his weapon. The army commander, a brutal man in an eye patch and a black uniform, gave the signal to close in, then took careful aim. A red fountain blossomed on the front of the rev-olutionary's shirt and he fell, twisting as he went. Across the compound, the rebel princess cursed. She checked the time bomb strapped to her wrist:
thirty seconds
. One hand fumbled with the strap of the bomb as she sped across the compound, dodging a hail of bullets while racing toward the enemy com-mander. Glossy dark hair spilled down her back as she ran. Her beautiful face was barely distorted with the effort, and as one man, the rebel troops behind her burst into a song which praised her valor. She was close enough to her enemy now to detach the bomb and fling it in his mocking face…