Empire of Bones (20 page)

Very well
, said the
raksasa
with unexpected compliance.
We will stay here. And you will serve us
.

We'll see about that
, Jaya thought, but she bowed her head and said, "Of course."

3. fvhaikurriye

Anarres sat in her house, looking out over the endless expanse of Khaikurrye, and trying not to cry. She should never have listened to EsRavesh and his promises. Oh, he'd honored them, all right, revising her status upward to the promised level, and her temenos had benefited as a result. That was the one good thing to come out of all this. But for herself, the in-crease in status was hollow. Her suppressant levels had been slightly reduced, and with that reduction had come the real-ization that the increase in status didn't matter anyway, was nothing more than a part of the endless hierarchical shifts within irRas society.

Oh, stop feeling sorry for yourself
Anarres commanded her-self sternly. She got up from the mat and collected a handful of rainwater, splashing it over the vine, which emitted a plan-gent chord in gratitude.

Methodically, Anarres watered all the plants and made sure that the feeding system of the house was correctly timed. Then she went into the sleeping chamber and searched for her plainest, most comfortable robe. She put it on, waxed her face, and bound her quills back into their mesh. It was mid-afternoon now, and at sunset she was supposed to go down to the Marginals. There was some sort of official function tonight, and EsRavesh wanted her to attend. Afterward, he told her, she'd be expected to entertain some of the guests.

Maybe it was just her imagination, but his instructions made her uneasy; she felt a premonition of disaster.

The deep sunlight suddenly seemed to darken. Anarres blinked, won-dering what would happen if she simply ignored EsRavesh's request and didn't show up. She had never contemplated dis-obeying the

'thaithoi
before, so this was not an option that she normally considered—though then again, among her own caste she enjoyed her work. Perhaps her touch of defiance had to do with the change in suppressant prescription.

The house chimed with a sudden, demanding note. Some-one was waiting to come in. Anarres glanced up.
Who is it, house
?

The house informed her that the visitor was her clade-sister, Shurris. Her spirits rising, Anarres hastened to the door. Then she stopped. The leaves of the singing vine were bristling in the direction of the door.

She sensed nothing from the house, but the vine was alarmed, and normally die vine loved Shurris, who brought it different waters. Anarres stared uncertainly at the vine and brushed a hand along its furred stem. The vine was bristling with static, sending prickles along her skin. The chime sounded again.

House?

The house replied with a jangling discord of pheromones. The sense was blurred, as though the message was somehow distorted. Anarres stood dithering in the hall for a moment, then made a decision. Quietly, activating her scale to its fullest extent, Anarres slipped around to the back of the house. From her own terrace she had access to others, and there was a route down through the ferns that she often took as a shortcut on her way to the nearest gardens. Pretending that this was noth-ing more than a quick jaunt, Anarres slipped between the ferns. She knew that if she thought about what she was doing, she'd lose courage, so she concentrated instead on the thought of seeing Sirru again. That thought hurt, quite a lot.

She hadn't expected to miss him so much…

Never mind
, Anarres told herself with sudden determina-tion.
You made a mistake, and now you're
going to put it right. Somehow
.

The question now was who might be after her, and where to go. She had no intention of heading for her family's temenos, or to Sirru's. If someone was pursuing her, it didn't make any sense to go somewhere that she was known, and be-sides, she didn't want to place anyone else in danger. The house chimed behind her with an insistent, warning chord. Anarres glanced over her shoulder. She could see nothing through the heavy blanket of ebony ferns, but if the
k/taithoi
had sent someone after her, he or she might be able to track her by scent; it depended on the person. The scale would pro-vide some protection, but not much.

Above her, something was moving along the terrace. Through the ferns, Anarres glimpsed a long jointed arm, end-ing in a bulbous claw. An armored head, mottled in crimson and mauve, swung slowly from side to side. Its eyes glinted in the shadows of the fronds. One of the Enforcer castes. Anarres did not wait to see more. She bolted down through the ferns and then, aided by the clarity of panic, she finally had an idea of where to hide. She would go to the Naturals' enclave, and ask for their help. She'd never before had the desire to go any-where near the Naturals—an unruly, inelegant lot who al-ways seemed to smell a bit strange—but she had heard that they hated the
khaithoi
, and so perhaps they might hide her. Anarres fled down through the labyrinth of the city, heading for the enclave.

Under the new laws, the Naturals had been suppressed, herded into the dead temeni at the very edge of the
desqusai
quarter. Before her status update, Anaxres had been convinced that this was a good thing, but now an element of doubt en-tered her mind. She had no conception of what it was like to be a Natural. The thought of being able to think whatever one pleased was a frightening one, and difficult even to entertain. It violated social order; it was heresy. Anarres was momentar-ily dizzied by the twinge of pain that snapped through her cerebral cortex as the suppressants kicked into the concept and dispelled it. She shook her head to clear it, wondering what it was she had been thinking about. Then memory returned and the cycle began again.

Anarres hurried on, thinking hard about innocuous mat-ters to dispel her growing migraine. She could hear the en-forcer coming down the row of terraces behind her, moving fast and hard through the ferns.

Anarres began to run, ignor-ing the discomfort of earth beneath her bare feet. She came out on the bank of a nearby canal. The dark water gleamed in the afternoon sunlight; it was a place of sudden harsh angles and sharp shadows. There was nowhere to hide.

Frantically, Anarres looked left and right, and saw that there was a barge gliding down the canal. A figure was hunched over, unmoving, in its prow. Standing on the bank, Anarres sent allure out across the water, hoping that the pilot was of a sexually compatible caste. His head snapped up, and she saw the sudden glow of interest in his yellow eyes. He turned the tiller toward the bank, and Anarres sprang over the short distance and onto the deck. Without trying to ex-plain, she bolted for cover beneath the long black roof of the barge. The pilot looked hopefully through the hatch.

Go, go. Anything will be yours
! Anarres promised rashly. The pilot's head disappeared, and she felt the vessel shift as he took it out into midstream. Making her way to the stern, she peered out between the cracks. The enforcer was standing bemused on the edge of the wharf, twitching a spiny tail. Anarres sank back into a crouch and took a shaky breath.

A shadow fell across die doorway: the pilot, returning. With a sigh, Anarres realized that it was time to honor her prom-ises.

THREE hours later, the barge had traveled through a series of locks into the farther reaches of the canal network, and Anarres put her head cautiously through the hatch. She could tell that they were approaching the area in which the Naturals were confined. There was a curious smell in the air, like the moments just before a storm. This area of the city was un-kempt and untended; no one wanted to get too close to the Naturals because of the danger of picking up some unhealthy clinging notion. Thanking the pilot, Anarres stepped out onto an ancient wharf. Its sides were carved with eroded faces of long-abolished castes; she wondered what kind of people had lived here, thousands of years ago.

Reaching out, she touched the wall and felt the material of ancient seeds crumbling be-neath her fingers.

There was a pungent waft of spice as a cloud of unfamiliar pollen drifted down on a current of air.

Anarres watched for a moment as the barge glided away, then started walking swiftly along the edge of the canal.

4. varanasi/ temple of LWga

Sirru had been trying to speak to Jaya's temenos, but could not get a word out of it. He cajoled, snapped, and praised, but the temenos remained perfectly and stubbornly mute.

"It doesn't seem to like me," he mused sadly.

Ir Yth sent:
/exasperation/a spi'te of contempt/
.

That is because it is not alive

Sirru's response was immediate: sympathy, loss, a wave of affection for Jaya. "Her temenos is dead ?

She should have told me. I would never had intruded. I should not have pressed her so hard—"

Ir Yth said impatiently,
It was never alive in the first place. These of your kindred do not grow their
temeni. They build, from earth
.

Once again, Sirru was bewildered. He had never met so baffling a
desqusai
caste. They couldn't speak properly; they lived in dead buildings and did not notice the difference. And from what he had found out about their reproductive habits, they were only just beginning to Make.
There is so much to sort out
and set right
.

Well, Sirru thought grimly, he'd have plenty of time to learn. Ir Yth had informed him that it could be a long time be-fore the next depth ship arrived to find out what had gone wrong. Sirru was trying not to think about Anarres or his home; it was just too depressing. But the wider implications of some hideous
khaithoi
plan were vastly worse. Moreover, there was the question of how long he and Ir Yth could survive on this new colony. He was not too concerned about his own physical demise—his First Body rested in translation storage around Rasasatra, after all. He did not, however, want to lose this Second Body. If his Second Body died, the reconstruction team would have to hang around until Sirru 3 or someone else from the temenos got the communication network on-line. And who knew what havoc Ir Yth might wreak here in his absence? Who knew what impact it might have on the
desqu-sai
caste as a whole? He thought uneasily of Arakrahali.

At least they now knew that Ir Yth was an enemy.
She has been too long from her own kind
, Sirru thought,
and that is lucky for me. She is forgetting how to lie
. No further mention had been made of what had befallen Ir Yth. Sirru had confirmed only that the translation plate had malfunctioned, due to the unstable state of the ship. It was fortunate, he said after a pause, that he and Jaya had been nearby to terminate the at-tempted connection and rescue Ir Yth from the damaged ap-paratus before she was too badly hurt.

He was certain that the
raksasa
did not believe him, and equally sure that she would pose no immediate challenge to his dubious explanation. Both of them grudgingly recognized that the other's talents might be needed until rescue arrived. It had, Sirru thought now, been extremely fortunate that Jaya had acted as she did. Another few moments and Ir Yth would have been whisked away to Rasasatra, there to report on the project's failure and secure the doom of the world of Tekhei. They had achieved a reprieve, but for how long?

Sirru could not help but wonder what would happen if he continued to forge ahead with the project. If Ir Yth was des-perate enough to sabotage a depth ship in order to discredit
desqusai
development, who knew what she might try here on the ground? He had not yet told Ir Yth about the ship's seed, carefully carried down with them in the pod and now resting in its own armored shell within his robes. The seed would start presenting serious problems soon; he needed to find somewhere cold to store it, and if this were a typical tempera-ture, a cold place would be hard to find unless he could some-how gain access to a refrigeration unit.

What do you intend to do
? Ir Yth asked after a pause.

"We will consider the viability of the project," Sirru in-formed her, stalling for time. "My first priority will be to examine the current state of communications. Are you con-versant with this?"

//
takes place through electronic media
. Ir Yth gave a delicate shudder.
Unspeakably primitive
.

"I feel," Sirru said, with something close to sympathy. "Well, I suppose that's adequate for now, but we'll need to get more sophisticated structures in place as soon as we can. Otherwise contacting the rescue team might be a little compli-cated."

Acquiescence.

"Before we proceed with that, though, I should like to see more of this new world," Sirru said. "I need to get a feel for it, for how people conduct themselves. What they eat, and what they drink." He suppressed a smile at Ir Yth's look of uncon-cealed revulsion;
kfiaithoi
, of course, had long since abandoned such indelicate behavior, at least in the presence of their social inferiors. "Will you ask Jay a to accompany us?"

/
will asfy
the
raksasa
said, glumly.

It seemed, however, that Jaya did not think it was a good idea for Sirru to start wandering about the place. It could be dangerous, she said. People didn't know anything about the aliens. Some fanatic might try to kill them. Here she glanced at Ir Yth, who confirmed that a previous attempt had already taken place. It would be necessary, Jaya said, for them to leave the temenos, and soon. She had already decided where to go, and was organizing travel arrangements. But in the mean-time, Sirru must stay here.

"I thought you said you'd explained all this in terms of the dominant metaphor?" Sirru asked Ir Yth, who replied, mysti-fied, J
thought I had
.

"We are analogous to the entities which correspond to the Primary Makers, I thought." Sirru's quills rattled briefly. " 'Gods,' as they call them here. What a strange, brave people, to challenge their Makers."

He was not particularly afraid, confident of his ability to handle this relatively small group of
desqusai;
he had proper speech, for instance, where they did not, and he was fairly well defended. Better that he remain safe. But still, he did want to see the city. If it was inadvisable to go out in plain view, therefore, he would go out unseen.