Empire of Bones (19 page)

That is the taste of shame
, her conscience kindly informed her. Sirru's face swam before her imagination's eye. She had to battle the impulse to snatch up her robes and run back through the gates while there was still time. It was almost a re-lief when the raft took off.

The journey to the orbital was short. Anarres waited pa-tiently in the queue to disembark, with the result that she was one of the last to exit. As she stepped through the gateway, the
hessirei
of the gate brushed her shoulder with an apologetic finger.

"Please excuse. Purpose of visit?"

Anarres stifled the small quiver of panic and said as she had been instructed to do, "My visit is a personal one," fol-lowed by a sending of delicate modesty.

The
hessirei
shuddered with embarrassment, but nonethe-less insisted, "A locative must be given."

Anarres murmured the locative of the orbital's over-seer, whom she had never met. "I'm here to see Uassi SiMethiKhajhat."

She stumbled a little over the unfamiliar syllables and hoped that the
hessirei
would put this down to maidenly reti-cence. From the sound of the locative, its owner was a mem-ber of one of the Weapons Castes, and her assumption was borne out by the sudden nervousness of the
hessirei
.

"Excuse, excuse. A pass
must
be produced."

Anarres gestured assent. "I have one."

She pressed her palm against the
hessirei's
multijointed hand, emanating the complex syllables of Core authority. She laced it with an element of personal appreciation, and the
hes-sirei's
thick skin flushed dull crimson.

"Thank you so much for your help," Anarres murmured, and headed swiftly through the gate and into the bowels of the ship. EsRavesh had supplied her with the location of the translation vaults, and she hastened toward them, sending out a complex array of conflicting traces to baffle the sensors. EsRavesh had been very thorough. He had also provided her with an array of code elements for die doors of the translation vaults; as she placed her palms against the screens, she felt her resentment growing that the
khaithoi
had ordered her to do their dirty work for them.

The suppressants muted her anger, but only by a litde. She did not know why it was so important to the
khaithoi
that Sirru should be impeded. It was only a small project he'd been assigned to, after all. As for the second piece of information that EsRavesh had given her, she didn't even have a name for the person; surely it couldn't be that significant. Politics had always bored Anarres to the point of faintness.

After she'd made a few abortive attempts at entry, the walls glided open and Anarres found herself in the translation vaults. Thousands of units, each the location of the manifold for a First Body, lined the chambers. She checked her instruc-tions.

First take care of Sirru, and then delete the manifold for a second, unnamed person.

Anarres set off down the myriad rows until she reached the locative that signified Sirru's First Body. She paused before the pattern-screen and ran her fingertips across it. Some sense of Sirru seemed to remain in the outlay, and momentarily it was as though he was standing unseen in front of her. But she was only imagining it, she was certain, and she told herself once more that she wasn't really
killing
Sirru, but just erasing the pattern for his First Body. No, Sirru himself was very much alive, far away on that little colony of his, and when he was ready to return, all the translators would have to do was re-construct his pattern.

Anarres was sure of it. And it would be the same for the second person, whoever he or she was.

Anyway, Anarres continued to reassure herself, Sirru and the other one wouldn't really be lost. The erasure could be at-tributed to translation degradation, which wasn't all that un-common, EsRavesh had told her. And by then she'd have her status upgrade, and she and Sirru could be together again. She didn't know why the erasure seemed to be so important to the
hhaithoi
, but EsRavesh had been very specific…

It's really all for the best
, Anarres told herself with uneasy conviction as she pressed her fingertips against the pattern-screen and introduced the viral overlay that would eradicate Sirru's First Body from the manifold. A light glowed:
deletion of manifold complete
.

That was one task accomplished. Now, she had to find this second person and do the same thing.

EsRavesh had supplied her only with coordinates, not a locative. She called up the manifold listing and searched through it, but she could not make sense of the data. Invoking a help-file, she bent down and whispered, "I'm looking for element/76,987/issue 360. The manifold was filed about a year ago. I can't seem to find it."

The help-file hummed. After a moment, it said, "Lo-cative?"

"I don't have one. Isn't this the right code?"

"The codes have changed. Security precaution."

"So you can't find it?"

"No."

How important could it be? Anarres decided to let the matter lie and get out of here. She could always tell EsRavesh that she'd followed his instructions; he'd probably never know the difference.

She hurried back through the translation vaults and waited for the next raft home to Khaikurriye. Beyond the view por-tals, Rasasatra was not visible. All she could see was night, and the endless, unforgiving stars.

2. varanast

Jaya returned to consciousness with a tight band of headache scoring her skull. The pod was rocking to a halt. There was a strong, sweet smell of fermenting watermelon, suddenly pun-gent, and the pod split to a sight of familiar burning blue sky. Jaya heard herself give a gasp of pure relief. Fighting aside the rotting mesh, she scrambled clear. They had landed, she saw with sudden fright, in the courtyard of the Temple of Durga. She was back in what passed for home.

Behind her, Sirru stepped from the pod in a damp tangle of robes to stand barefoot in the dust of the courtyard. Along the tiers of the red temple the monkeys fell silent, one by one.

"Wait here," Jaya said to Sirru, and ran to the gate. When she looked inside the gatehouse, she could have wept with re-lief. Rakh was there. His arms were folded, and his Uzi hung by his side. He scowled out across the empty square. She might have been gone only a few hours. What had happened to Anand and his men?

"Rakhi!" she cried, suddenly cross. If she'd known he'd been standing here all along, it would have saved a world of worry. The big man turned, and his eyes widened.

"
Jaya
? Is that you?"

She remembered, then, how much the aliens had changed her. When Rakh had last set eyes on her, she might have been ninety years old, but now she was young again. At least on the outside. There had been no mirrors on the ship, but now she could see her reflection in the office window: a strange, fierce face, hawk-boned.

"Your
hair
. And what happened to
your eyes}"

"What?" She peered into the glass, and caught a sharp golden gleam. So much for being unobtrusive now. Her eyes were as yellow as Sirru's, a tiger's gilded gaze. She'd stick out a mile in anything other than a freakshow. Maybe if she wore a veil and sunglasses…

"The others saw—that." Rakh, mustering himself, nodded in the direction of the pod. "They ran." His scorn was as pal-pable as Sirru's emotional speech. Jaya grinned.

A laconic voice came from the back office. "I didn't." Shiv Sakai, beaming, poked his head around the door.

Rakh added gruffly, "I knew you'd come back. But why did you come back
here
?"

"God, Rakh, why did
you
?" She drew him out into the courtyard, where there was less chance of being overheard; she was sure the temple had been bugged. Speaking low into Rakh's ear, she said, "What happened to Anand?"

A small, grim smile appeared on Rakh's austere counte-nance. "The government intervened. There have been inter-esting political developments since you left. Singh has admitted to the presence of an alien; there's been an official statement."

"And Anand?"

"He's in disgrace. Singh fired him."

"Why did they send him in here in the first place? To get rid of me, I suppose?"

"Singh says he didn't send him in. That was off the record, though, and I'm sure he's lying. But now Anand's failed, Singh's scapegoated him."

"
You
had an 'off the record' conversation with the min-ister?"

"We are terrorists no longer, Jayachanda—we are dele-gates. I told the minister that only you knew where the alien was, and the price was Anand. If he got rid of the butcher-prince, then you'd bring the alien back. Which you did." He spoke as though this had not been mere coincidence. "However—"

Jaya cut him short.

"Rakhi. We need to keep this place as safe as possible for as long as we can, and work on getting the aliens out of here. Anand might be off the scene officially, but he's not going to rest until I'm dead. A blow to his pride will only make things worse."

"That's what I'm trying to—"

"So we can't stay here. We're too visible. And something has happened, something unexpected. I don't know what to-morrow will bring."

"Jaya, listen to me. We've been making inquiries. Anand's working for Naran Tokai."

Jaya stared at him. "What?"

"We only found out yesterday. Shiv had him followed, asked around. Tokai's living in Anand's ancestral palace; he's using it as a base. He's hired Anand as a personal security ad-visor."

"Tokai's got economic clout, and the power to give Anand anything he wants," Jaya said bitterly. She leaned back against the wall. "Being fired from the official military has just freed him up, and with Tokai's backing—no one in the govern-ment's going to go against Tokai's wishes. He
is
the pharma-ceutical industry here."

"This only confirms that you are right—we cannot stay here."

"Start working on it. You know where we can go. And the aliens are coming with us." Rakh looked at her out of night-dark eyes, not needing to reply. That was the advantage of a shared history. Rakh knew exactly where she was talking about.
Yamunotri: the mountain fortress. The site of our last stand
.

As Rakh returned to his office, Jaya strode across the court-yard, fighting the urge to remain against the wall and bask in the heat of the sun. Whatever lay ahead, it was good to be back, away from the dim, green half-world of the ship. The colors of the temple seemed to glow: blood red walls against the Shiva blue of the sky. The light lay thick and slow, sending slanted shadows into the shrine, and the hot air spun with dust. Somewhere, she could smell frying samosas, and the oily odor made her stomach contract.

She was suddenly ravenous. Maybe Rakh could send the runner to the cafe across the street. But there was little time to think about that now.

She squinted up into the limitless heavens. Would the ship crash as its orbit decayed? Or would it simply wither like a plant that had seeded? Jaya glanced back at die pod, now de-composing in the sun. Ir Yth stood, watching, her four stumpy arms folded uncomfortably about herself. Sirru was exploring the courtyard.

What are they going to do, if they're stranded here? What are we going to do with them
? Jaya thought she'd understood the first lesson of power—
-Keep it close to your chest
—but now she was not so sure. She only knew that she did not want the aliens to be whisked away to some American laboratory. They belonged to Bharat now. And what was happening in the rest of the world? What were the Americans doing now that Singh had admitted to the presence of an alien? That was an-other thing she had to find out, as soon as possible. Shiv Sakai would surely know.

The thought of power, of a cure for Selenge, kept pound-ing in her head like the beat of her own heart.

So much for her dreams of being ordinary.

Sirru was standing by the wall, whispering to himself. He cocked his head as if expecting the wall to reply. Jaya gave him a doubtful glance. By now, the pod had -decomposed to a trac-ery of wiry veins.

Was this what the ship looked like now, a vast and delicate skeleton drifting on the winds from the sun?

The thought was deeply troubling. She said abruptly to Ir Yth, "I need to talk to you."

It is hot here
, the
ra'tsasa
said, irrelevantly. /
did not thin't it would be so hot
.

Jaya remembered that this was Ir Yth's first actual visit in the flesh. She forbore from asking what the
raksasa
had thought it would be like.

"Please come inside."

The
raksasa
fluted across to Sirru and they followed Jaya up into one of the little rooms on the second tier. Sirru still seemed to be talking to himself, a murmured litany echoing from blood red walls. Jaya sat on a bench by a window and gazed out over a tumble of roofs, and then at the river, molten in the sunlight. It all looked so normal. Sirru peered past her shoulder with interest. A skein of crows flew up into the day and he blinked, momentarily startled.

"Ir Yth," Jaya said. "I need to know. What will happen to the ship?"

The
raffsasa
began to sway from side to side like a child's spinning top, a disconcertingly uncontrolled gesture.

//
is dying. It will fade to dust and fall
.

"And you knew it was dying?" Jaya asked. The answer was obvious, but she wanted to see what Ir Yth would say.

A long, mournful pause ensued, then a jangling discord of emotions, stronger than any Jaya had felt before from Ir Yth. A black line of old blood still marked die
raksasa'%
face like a fissure in the earth.

At last Ir Yth replied,
No
.

Jaya knew that she was lying, but let the matter drop. "Well, what happens now? Are you stuck here?

Will your people send another ship?"

Eventually.

How long is "eventually"
? Jaya wondered. Aloud, she said, "I don't know what
my
people will do when they find you're stranded here. They may want to imprison you, experiment upon you…" She was trying to frighten the
raksasa
, but Ir Yth merely stared at Jaya with detached interest. "I think it is bet-ter if you and the mediator stay here with me and my—my team, here in my temenos."