21
TAKING OUR LEAVE
Festina came back the next day at noon. By then the workers had packed, Counselor had arranged for neighboring hives to look after the vegetable fields, and Zeeleepull had made a complete nuisance of himself, getting in everybody else’s way.
Of all of the kids, he was the most excited—telling me things he wanted to see on Troyen, places he wanted to go, stuff he wanted to do. After a while I just had to say, “You realize if we’re lucky, we’ll never set foot on the planet. Radio the missing Explorers, pick them up, fly away. No going down ourselves unless there’s a problem.”
“But Troyen is,” he insisted. “Is
Troyen.
Is home.”
“Was
home,” I said. “Nobody knows what-all’s been destroyed in the past twenty years. Buildings bombed. Famous art burned or stolen. Even natural scenery gets wrecked or covered with ugly-looking bunkers. Whatever you think you’ll see, it’s not there anymore.”
He refused to listen. Of all the people in his hive, Zeeleepull had the most romantic notions about the planet he’d left as a hatchling. He told me he’d been brought up by elderly human sisters, Willa and Walda, who’d devoted themselves to raising the boy in accordance with his sacred heritage. The way he spoke of them, I just knew the women didn’t have a clue what they were talking about—their heads had got crammed with off-kilter ideas about Troyen, sparked by a ten-day trip they’d made in their thirties. That trip must have been the one impulsive thing the sisters had ever done, and they’d built their lives around it ever after…which explains why they leapt at the chance to take a baby Mandasar under their roof and acquaint him with his fabulous culture.
No wonder Zeeleepull spoke such bad Troyenese. And worse English. He’d come to human language very late, because the sisters didn’t want to “pollute his mental development with contaminating influences.” When they finally realized he had to learn English to communicate with his fellow Mandasars—the other kids spoke English 99 percent of the time—Willa and Walda encouraged Zeeleepull to use English words but Troyenese syntax, so he wouldn’t “warp his brain’s neural connections” with an alien grammar.
I got the feeling Zeeleepull could speak normal English if he wanted to, but now he was making a political point. He’d even persuaded his fellow warriors to speak the same way, especially when they were out on maneuvers together. Like a secret code that proved you belonged to the club.
It didn’t hurt that Counselor and the workers loved Zeeleepull to pieces for the bullheaded way he stuck to his twisted-up word structures. Us guys—even when we’re big red platonic lobsters—we put on silly poses to impress the girls.
No rutabagas got weeded that day—when Festina’s skimmer set down on the road, every Mandasar in the valley was there to watch. A big colorful horde of them, reds and whites and browns, all jostled each other for the best view. It reminded me of something Sam said as we watched a riot from my palace balcony: “Like a water tank in a seafood restaurant: lobsters crammed in shoulder to shoulder.”
When I thought about it now, it’d been a cruel, mean thing for Sam to say…but she had a point. Mandasars cram together a lot; they like it. They’re the sort of species who snuggle together all the time—who bed down in a huddle, and who press into a single corner of a room rather than spacing themselves evenly around. Even these kids raised by humans…you’d think they’d be taught to maintain some personal distance, but there they were on the road, practically crawling on top of each other as the skimmer settled down to the pavement. Even so, they managed to skootch together a little more to clear a path for me up to the side hatch.
The hatch opened. Festina hopped out and smiled when she saw me. “Edward! You’re looking better. Good. Great. Very fine.” She was eyeing me up and down. “You had us worried when you passed out last night.”
“
I
wasn’t worried,” said a voice inside the skimmer. “He was just exhausted.” Kaisho’s wheelchair floated into the sunlight and lowered itself to the road. Her hair looked beautifully combed this morning—combed so it covered her face like a silver-black veil, very neat and glossy. Even the Balrog looked well-groomed. Under the bright orange sun, you couldn’t tell Kaisho’s legs glowed on their own; they just looked like thick beds of moss, as unthreatening as red pillows.
“Well,” Festina said, still giving me the once-over (the twice-over by now), “you look damned terrific for a man who was poisoned yesterday. Are you ready to go?”
“Um.” I leaned in, and whispered, “Is it okay if I bring some company?”
“Who?”
I pointed behind me. Counselor, Zeeleepull, and the workers were lined up looking freshly scrubbed and gleamy bright themselves…all except Nib, who’d tried to paint a BON VOYAGE sign and got smears of green paint all over its just-washed white hands. (Workers!) Naturally, Zeeleepull carried the luggage; most of the hive’s worldly possessions were strapped to his back, boxed up in a wooden crate labeled
ONIONS.
Festina sighed deeply. “How many of them do you plan on bringing?”
“Five.”
Counselor and the others waved gleefully—antennas as well as hands.
“Told you,” Kaisho whispered to Festina.
“I could have guessed myself,” Festina muttered back. “Are they all right?”
“They won’t cause trouble,” I promised.
“That’s not what I meant.” Festina motioned to Kaisho. “You and the Balrog check them out.”
Kaisho’s wheelchair glided toward the five Mandasars…and all of a sudden, the rest of the crowd scrambled back, putting a good healthy distance between themselves and the woman’s mossy legs. I don’t know if they’d heard gossip about the Balrog since last night, or if they all just spontaneously decided they didn’t like the moss’s smell. Either way, they were doing their best to keep clear; and from the looks on their faces, Counselor and the others would have been turning tail too, if they didn’t think they’d hurt their chance of seeing Troyen.
“What’s Kaisho doing?” I whispered to Festina.
“The Balrog can supposedly determine whether a being is sentient. Don’t ask me how it works—maybe a killer gives off non-sentient psychic vibrations. The damned moss isn’t perfectly telepathic, thank God, but it can sometimes do an uncanny job of peeking into someone’s mind.”
No kidding,
I thought. Out loud, I said, “You really think the Mandasars are dangerous non-sentients?”
“No.” Festina gave me an apologetic look. “But we have to make sure, Edward. Otherwise, we could end up like
Willow
—killed for not being careful enough. The League expects us to make our best efforts not to violate the law.”
“So you don’t trust the kids, but you trust the Balrog?”
“In this particular instance, I trust the Balrog’s judgment. It doesn’t mean I trust the Balrog in general—that fuzzy-assed bastard scares the piss out of me. But on our upcoming trip, the Balrog’s life is at stake too.”
“Why?”
“Kaisho’s coming with us to Troyen,” Festina replied. “If one of your Mandasars is non-sentient and the Balrog lies to us about that, it’s the Balrog who’ll die when our ship crosses the line. We mere humans will be blameless; the League won’t fault us for being deceived by a superior species.”
As she spoke, Festina had a grim little smile on her face…and for a second, I thought she might be hoping the Balrog
would
get executed by the League. If there was no other way to get rid of the creature—if you couldn’t scrape it off its host—then maybe you’d look for situations that’d kill the Balrog without hurting the human underneath.
A few seconds before, I was going to ask Festina why she wanted Kaisho to come with us to Troyen…but I decided I didn’t want to know.
The wheelchair drifted around each Mandasar in turn—Counselor trying to look composed, Zeeleepull trying to look tough, the workers trying to look so meekly unimportant they wouldn’t be worth eating—while Kaisho barely turned her head to give the kids a glance. Why would she? She couldn’t see for all the hair in front of her face, so why pretend to stare at anyone?
“Why does she wear her hair like that?” I asked Festina. “Does she have moss on her face? Is she really really…” I stopped. Considering the blotch on the admiral’s own cheek, there was no polite way to finish my question.
But Festina guessed what I was going to say. “Is she really really ugly?” Festina suggested. “Is she
disfigured?”
“Um. Sorry.”
“No,” the admiral said, “it’s a valid question. Especially since Kaisho used to be an Explorer. You know she must have had
something
wrong with her.”
I felt myself blush. I couldn’t even look in the admiral’s direction.
“Kaisho did have…a facial condition,” Festina said. “You don’t need to know the details. But when she got infected with the Balrog, the condition cleared up. The Balrog actually tinkered with Kaisho’s genes and hormones to cure the problem. I suppose the Balrog was trying to be nice; it could read Kaisho’s surface thoughts well enough to know how she hated the…blemishes. In a way, clearing up Kaisho’s face was like a wedding gift—a demonstration that being bonded to a Balrog wasn’t all bad.
“But from Kaisho’s point of view,” Festina continued, “her face and its flaws were key parts of her life. Her identity. To have that identity casually erased by an alien parasite…well, imagine being subjected to cosmetic surgery till you didn’t look like yourself. It wouldn’t matter if you ended up more beautiful than you’d ever dared hope; you’d feel violated. Especially if your hideous old face was what made you feel like an Explorer, and that was the one thing in your life you felt proud of.”
Festina suddenly sucked in a sharp breath and turned away from me. “Anyway,” she muttered, “I’m sure that’s what Kaisho feels. Her mind gets more and more integrated with the Balrog every day, but still there’s a part of her, outraged and bitter over what the damned moss did to her face. Making her look ‘normal’ instead of like herself. So she hides behind her hair in shame—she doesn’t want to be seen as she is now.”
Odd. Someone hiding and ashamed for being made better than she was to start with. Of course, “better” is always in the eye of the beholder…but if I were Kaisho, I’d cover my |legs, not my face.
The Balrog’s inspection didn’t take long. One circuit around each Mandasar, then Kaisho announced, “They’re acceptable. No more homicidal than the rest of you.”
Festina grimaced. “Not what I’d call an effusive recommendation.”
“What do you expect?” Kaisho asked. “Humans and Mandasars are borderline at best. With luck in the gene lottery, and no crisis that stresses you past the breaking point, you can stay sentient all your life. If luck goes the other way…you flunk the sentience test. Nothing to be embarrassed about—both your species are still evolving in the right direction. You just have farther to go before you reach the exalted level of…oh, a certain mossy race that modesty forbids me to mention.”
Zeeleepull muttered, “Evolve, evolve, evolve, and end up as moss? Stupid universe.”
“Now you know how the dinosaurs felt,” Festina told him.
“All right,” the admiral announced, raising her voice to the assembled Mandasars, “as you probably know, my name is Festina Ramos and I…I’m heading for Troyen, where I hope I’ll find information to solve your recruiter problem.”
The kids gave a cheer, but short and polite…like they wanted to hear more before they got really enthusiastic.
“In the meantime,” Festina said, “the recruiters should be lying low. Last night, they murdered one of your people as he bravely protected Consort Edward and me; as a result of Wiftim’s sacrifice, the police can’t ignore your problems the way they’ve done in the past. With luck, Mandasars all over Celestia will be able to demand better protection…and the cops will have to take them seriously.”
That got a slightly bigger cheer. I could imagine how frustrated these kids must be, getting dismissed every time they complained to the Civilian Protection Office. Now, as Festina said, the police had no choice but to put the squeeze on recruiters.
“So I hope,” the admiral continued, “you won’t have trouble while we’re gone. Just in case though, I’m leaving this skimmer which I rigged last night with a Mandasar-shaped control seat. You can fly patrols over the valley and keep watch for anyone suspicious—this baby has the navy’s best sensor equipment, able to pick up human heat signatures ten kilometers away. Nobody will be able to sneak up on you.”
Everyone in the crowd was beaming now—especially the gentles, who’d probably get into a big fight about who should drive the skimmer. All gentles love to operate expensive machinery…and each one is absolutely convinced she’s the best driver in the universe.
Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing I was heading off to Troyen; for the next little while, Celestia might get pretty dangerous.
Particularly Celestian airspace.
“That’s settled then,” Festina said. “I hope we won’t be gone more than three weeks, but you never know. Whatever happens, we’ll be back as soon as we can.” She smiled. “In the meantime, cooperate with the police but don’t let down your guard. The recruiters hurt themselves badly last night when they resorted to murder; they’ve suddenly lost a lot of friends. Even companies that buy employees from slavers will think twice about dealing with killers. So there’s a chance the recruiters will grow stupid and desperate in the coming days.”
“If that’s true,” said a gentle in the crowd, “why are you taking
Teelu
away from us?”
Festina glanced at me. “You want to answer, or shall I?”
“Um,” I said. Then I found words coming out of my mouth, with no direction from my brain—taken over again by whatever had grabbed me before. That worried me; I’d hoped that getting possessed was just some weirdness from being poisoned. Why was it happening now, when I felt okay and healthy?
“Children of Troyen,” my mouth said, “the next few weeks may be hard for everybody; but if we succeed, you’ll never need to fear recruiters again. Just as important, good people have been abandoned on the homeworld and they deserve to be rescued…if they’re still alive. They’ve been forced to fend for themselves a long long while. It’s time we did something to help them.”