Migration (22 page)

“Irrelevant,” came the reply. “Even if we knew, it would be kept from you until reaching our destination. For security reasons.”

“Do you object to travel offworld?” This from Kay.

Mac’s fingers dug into the upholstery, the fabric a little worn and dusty. Worn by Human use. Dusty from the processes of life on this planet. Familiar.
Home
.

“No,” she said calmly. “I’ll go wherever I must.” She didn’t bother asking for a guarantee they’d bring her back again. In Fourteen’s terms, it was irrelevant.

Instead, Mac took the envelope in her hands, feeling its familiar metallic texture between her fingers. She drew a breath, then prepared to rip it in half.

“What are you doing?” With that cry, Fourteen tried to snatch it back.

Mac hung on, startled. “I’m opening it.”

“Violence is not necessary. Apply any body fluid.” Kay then pressed the cushion tighter to his abdomen as if the idea offended his
douscent
.

“Ah.” With a doubtful look at each alien, and doing her best to forget the envelope had come out of those paisley shorts, Mac touched the moistened tip of her tongue to one edge.

It unfolded in her hands like a flower, the envelope itself becoming a flat sheet of multisided mem-paper. Its now-white surface was coated in black text beneath the seal of the IU. But as she adjusted her grip to angle it toward the light from the nearest window, the words winked in and out of meaning, sentences fragmented. The more she tried to make sense of it, the less she could understand. It was Instella, the interspecies’ language. Mac was sure of it. She should be able to read this with a little work.

Rather than shout her frustration—
and reveal her ongoing issue with print
—Mac casually folded the sheet, which reformed into a sealed envelope in her palm. “Fine,” she said. “When do we leave?”

“As soon as I inform the IU you are ready and willing—”

“Not so fast,” Kay groaned from his seat, eyestalks tilting in different directions. “Some of us aren’t up to moving vehicles.”

Fourteen pursed his lips and made a ruder noise than usual. “Idiot. I told you to take your medication. Your discomfort is irrelevant. As soon as I inform the IU, arrangements will be made—including notifying your government, Mac, and the helpful Mr. Lister. Tomorrow would be the earliest for all to be in place. More likely the day after that.” He made an expansive gesture at their surroundings, then bounced where he sat. “But is this not an excellent place to wait? We have Mac. And we have
poodle!”

Kay muttered
“Usish”
again and turned his eyestalks from the exuberant Myg.

Mac tucked the envelope from the IU into a pocket, fastening it closed with a press of the mem-fabric.
One thing to be swept up in the moment, Em. Another to have time to think things through.
She hoped her courage would last two more days.

She slipped her leg over the arm of the chair and sat down. “What else can you tell me about this gathering?”

“It is unprecedented—if you are familiar with the politics of the IU . . . ?” Kay let those words trail into a question. Mac shook her head. “Ah.”

“Idiot,” Fourteen said promptly. Mac wasn’t sure if he meant his companion or her. “All you need to know is that everything about the IU, everything it does, has a shape.” His hands described a series of circles, each larger than its predecessor. “At its center are the oldest species, the ones first to the group. The Sinzi, of course, are at the core. Together, these are the decision-makers. Outside of this lie those species who are well trusted by the oldest and are wealthy, or wield some other power. These are asked to carry out those decisions and to communicate them to others. Beyond are all those species come recently to the transects, who haven’t proved either economic worth or stability. Informed, but rarely consulted.”

“This is the political position our two species share with yours, Mac,” Kay broke in. “It would normally remain so, but our systems lie along the Naralax Transect. The IU realizes we must be all included—perhaps even in the innermost councils. This is what is unprecedented.” He sounded more exasperated than grateful. Mac could understand that reaction.

Fourteen laced his fingers together, as if in prayer. “You see, the Dhryn are not some nebulous threat to us. They wait on our doorsteps, ready to strike either of our worlds next. Indeed, our closest trading partner, the Eelings, recently succumbed.”

“I’d heard Ascendis was attacked. A Human ship was there—it sent a report.”
Before it crashed and everyone died or was consumed by Dhryn,
Mac reminded herself, breath catching in her throat. “I don’t have the details. What happened?”

“The Eeling light has been extinguished forever,” Fourteen’s lips trembled and he put his hands over his eyes.

“By the Dhryn?” Mac demanded sharply.

“The Human ship finished the job of destroying Ascendis,” said Kay, his voice growing cold and harsh. “To their credit, many of the—feeders—were caught on the surface. But the planet can no longer support the life it knew.”

Feeders on the surface
. . . Mac shook off the horrific image, focusing on the puzzle. “I was told the Dhryn left the system.”

“There was no one to stop them.”

Mac leaned back and stared at the ceiling rafters, seeing something completely different, a world made of flesh. “Dhryn wouldn’t leave without their Progenitor,” she mused out loud. “So she wasn’t on the planet when Captain Wu sent his ship into it. But why?”

“Isn’t it obvious? They wanted to be able to leave quickly. As they did.”

Mac looked at Kay. “Nothing,” she warned him, “is obvious about the Dhryn.”

“Except the destruction they leave behind,” he countered, upper eyestalks rigid. “The only Eelings to escape had crowded into sublight ships and scattered through their system to hide. They are delicate beings, Mac, too delicate for such stress. Most died before they could be found and rescued. Those we did save were taken to our systems, Trisulian and Myg, but a pitiful few are of breeding age, even if they have the will. The Eelings didn’t colonize other worlds.”

Fourteen dropped his hands, his eyelids glistening with moisture. “It is the end of a vibrant species.”

How could the mind comprehend a loss on that scale?
Mac didn’t even try.

“Worse than that,” added Kay. His fingers were busy combing the hair down the front of his head.
A nervous habit,
Mac decided. “We fear—” he made a sharp quelling gesture when Fourteen opened his mouth as if to protest, “—we fear our systems will be next. We’ll either feed the Dhryn, or become the chosen battle-ground where they are fought by the IU. That we will lose, no matter the outcome.”

Bureaucracy. Hierarchies. When survival was at stake,
Mac thought sadly,
how soon they could become a threat instead of protection. How little the parts could seem to matter, when the whole was in peril.

She studied the two of them. Whatever else, she had no problem reading the anxiety in their body language—no matter how alien, they shared that peculiar tension of limbs needing to move but forced to wait. “Then we’ll have to trust this gathering will think of safer alternatives.” Mac tapped her head with a knuckle. “It might just be a case of digging out the right idea.”

Fourteen lunged from the couch to grab Kay’s arm. “Hurry!” he urged. “There are knives and a spatula in the kitchen!” He peered at Mac. “Perhaps a spoon.”

Kay’s left eyestalk twisted to glare at him and he shook his arm free. “Mygs have the most inappropriate sense of humor,” he said to Mac.

Mac didn’t quite smile. “It helps, sometimes.”

“Exactly.” Fourteen rubbed his palms together, then slapped them on his knees. He cried out and lifted his hands again. From the shocked look on his face, he’d forgotten both sunburn and ointment.

“Now that’s funny,” Kay announced, eyestalks waving.

Mac sniffed.
Sure enough.

“Why don’t we continue this on the porch?” she suggested.
Where there was fresh air.
“You go ahead. I’ll make some coffee and bring it out.”

Without waiting for an answer, Mac stood and went to the kitchen. Her hands were trembling as she lifted them to push open the door. She frowned at them.
This was no time to be thinking about a devastated world and its survivors.

Yet she couldn’t help remembering . . . Brymn had come to Earth, sought her out for one reason. Mac’s work with salmon considered populations in terms of genetic diversity; she calculated evolutionary units, the minimum amount of diversity required for a group to respond to evolutionary stress without going extinct. The Dhryn . . . he’d asked her about determining the evolutionary unit for an entire species. For a world.

Without knowing what was to come, what he’d become, Brymn had desperately wanted to know it was possible, that she could produce a number, reveal some formula to show how many must survive, in order for some to continue.

Mac pressed her forehead to the door and closed her eyes.

They’d both been so dangerously ignorant. He’d asked for the sake of his kind, fearing their persecution by the Ro, sensing an approaching doom. She’d become his friend, begun to work on the problem, only to learn, too late, it wasn’t the Dhryn who were threatened.

But what if Brymn had asked the right question, after all?
Mac thought. Not about any one species. About the Interspecies Union. That population. That diversity.

How few species could it contain, and survive? At what minimum would the transects between systems fail, if they weren’t first destroyed to keep out the Dhryn?

Mac shoved the door open with all her strength.

The resulting bang didn’t startle the man sitting at the kitchen table, who merely leaned back in his chair.

“You do keep interesting company, Dr. Connor,” Nikolai Trojanowski remarked.

- Encounter -

THE IMRYA fleet waited with the patience of their kind, settled into position where the Naralax Transect was locked into their system’s space, orbiting Mother Sun with the other transects’ mouths like one pearl among many. A perilous black-hearted pearl.

Such disturbing analogies were produced each day and posted throughout the fleet, from engine rooms deep in the bowels of every ship, to the suites of the battle cruisers where officers maintained households, from navigation arrays to the galleys. For the Imrya were a lyrical folk, renowned for their poetry as well as the interminable amount of time it took for them to get to any point in conversation.

Trade negotiations with non-Imrya were best accomplished by remote.

Months ago, an Imrya outpost had been decimated by Dhryn. Not that they’d had a name for the attackers back then. Imrya news-casters had spent weeks composing anguished rhapsodies about an unseen terror, an unimaginable power able to eat through safety seals and make entire crews simply vanish as if they’d never existed.

But now the IU had named this fear, that name and warning sent to all. The Imrya, as befitted a species who had contributed to the IU for generations, one of the strong arms upon which all depended, had received even more. Details of ship structure. Potential weaknesses. Unconfirmed rumors of attack strategy.

Warning that where the Dhryn had been, they would come again.

If the Dhryn dared return, the Imrya fleet would be ready.
Watching the poisoned fruit in their orchard.

That which is Dhryn feels fear, knows dread, but not of others.

There is only that which is Dhryn.

All else . . .
sustains
.

That which is Dhryn fears time, dreads distance.

Being too slow? Losing the Taste?

Either ends the Great Journey.