Empire of Bones (41 page)

The rocks were sharp beneath her, and she took the bag of goat's blood from her jacket and punctured it with one of them, her hand trem-bling under the drug.
Have I overdone the damn pills
? She could no longer feel Anand: the tranquilizers were working, shutting him off. The blood seeped down her face, wet and thick. She lay still, her eyes half closed, her face and side as bloody as Durga's own. She willed her mind into stillness.

"Nihalani!" Anand's voice was thick, the cultured accent stripped away. He shook his head as though trying to clear it. She could just see him, standing amongst the rocks above her. She did not yet have a clear shot. Torchlight glinted from the barrel of the AK.47. She heard the intake of his breath as he saw her below him: crumpled, bloody, unmoving. The shock of seeing her below him, wounded or dead, was enough; all the conjuror needed was a second or two to make the illusion complete. He leaned around the corner of the rock to get a better look. She saw his shoulders slump a little, relaxing. She heard the click as he shot the bolt down on the gun, making sure, but she was already bringing up her gun. The tranquil-izers made it hard, but she was used to fighting her body. Her finger squeezed the trigger.

The shot was the loudest thing in the world. Amir was still standing over her, high on the rock, and her first stupid thought was:
Why, he's got married
. There was a crimson tear between his eyes. His mouth was open slightly with surprise, and then he fell and the world changed. Then, for a fraction of a second, Jaya was ripped apart. The network had come on-line. She was everywhere at once again: she was watching from Sirru's eyes down the barrel of the rifle. She was Rajira and Halil, relaying instructions down the complex network of an alien virus. Jaya followed the viral line down through a hundred minds; if not for the tranquilizers, she realized with horror, she might have gone mad. She sensed Anand's con-sciousness as it fled away, snapped by death but still somehow present, receding fast and with a terrified sense of exhilarated freedom.

The linked network was reaching out, sending messages across a relay so vast and alien that Jaya could not comprehend it. She could see her own sprawled form: Sirru's viewpoint. He had reached the rim of rock where Anand's body lay. And then another perspective: seeing a frozen tableau of Sirru's small fig-ure above the shore.
Who's that
? Whoever it was had to be stand-ing in the middle of the lake.

Startled, she scrambled to the rim and looked out over the dark surface. Something was coming across the water, gliding like a huge, unfurling sail.

An unfamiliar voice, directly overhead, said startlingly loud inside her mind,
/Receiving/Communication
networ't now on-line/Please respond/
.

But something was already replying. A depth ship, out near somewhere named Zhei Eren. A torrent of information flooded through Jaya's head, too much to bear, but the curling
thing
above her picked it up and redistributed it calmly throughout the network.

/First Stage is confirmed/preparing to enter system orbit/ship's Receiver prepare/

Jaya was flung back into the confines of her own head, but not out of the link. She could still hear the others, but infor-mation was relayed around her, sidelining her so that she could concentrate on the ship.

She knelt in the dust, shaking, covered with drying blood. Sirru dropped the rifle and crouched by her side.

"Jaya? Are you hurt?"

She shook her head.

"The network is on-line. A ship is coming. And your child is safe."

"What?" She gazed at him wonderingly, and he reached out and gathered her against the cold folds of his robe. Something flickered over her shoulders; she could see light from the corner of her eye. Into her ear, Sirru murmured, "Jaya? Speak to your child, and it will speak to the depth ship."

"Speak to it? What
is
it?"

"It is the seed, what else? The child of the ship, and of your own self. It has grown in the cold. Listen, and speak. That is what you have been designed to do, Jaya." His voice was gen-tle, as always, but beneath it she heard the unmistakable note of warning.
You have no choice anymore. The world is a different
place from now on. For both of us. For everyone
.

"I'll try." Jaya shut her eyes and listened. It was as though a door opened in her mind. The well of the stars lay beneath and a god's voice said,

Maintaining orbit.

It was not the voice from her childhood, the first and oldest ship of the Tekhein system. This ship was young by compari-son, and its voice was green and glowing.

"What shall I say?" Jaya whispered, and Sirru said, "Tell it that everything is well. That project development is proceed-ing normally, as planned."

TEKHEI

i

Depth skip/ lekhei

J^The warm walls of the ship pulsed with life beneath '
mkafi
Jaya's hands. It was in low orbit now, and Earth filled ¦lithe viewing screen, Bharat on nightside, starred with
m
f veins of lights. She had been here for almost a month. jjP
Oracle, magician, goddess, terrorist, and now envoy to the ^BBj^stars. We
are many things, we
dalit. She had passed through so many transformations that surely, she believed, one more wouldn't hurt.

For now, like everyone else on Earth, she was
desqusai
. The visitors, themselves a caste of the
üRas-desqusai
, seemed pleased.
It's becoming a Tekjiein ship now
, they said of her im-probable daughter, the seed, bonding to Jaya and to Earth be-fore sailing out into who knew where to found a new colony.
Welcome to the fold
. Negotiations were opening up with the major pharmaceutical corporations. The visitors were over-riding governments with airy insouciance. Jaya increasingly heard the name of Naran Tokai. Everyone was waiting for the
desqusai
overseer, one EsMirhei.

Yet she was not only an envoy now. She was a mother, par-ent to a—
what
, exactly? She placed her hands flat on the viewing screen and leaned her head against its invisible sur-face, feeling once more as though she was standing with noth-ing between her and empty space. At the very corner of the screen, she could see the fold of sail that was the seed floating serenely in the darkness. She had seen the seed's face only once. After the gun battle at the lake, she had gazed wonder-ingly up to see it hovering above her. The seed's arms were crossed over her breast; fierceness was fading from a face that was the image of Jaya's own. Pale hair streamed down the seed's back, but her skin was a wan, luminous green and her torso terminated in a series of complex folds, extending out from hips and shoulder blades to form an undulating mass of material, sails rather than wings.

/Parent! Are you safe? Are you harmed?/
the seed had de-manded back there on the shore of the lake. Jaya had quickly replied that all was well. The emotions emanating from the seed had been flayed and raw and needy, the only way in which she resembled a child.

lis it time to go? Please?/Atmosphere
—/
cannot
—/

Sirru had stepped in at that point, directing the pod down from the depth ship. He had gently, but firmly, pushed aside Jaya's pleas that they go back down to the fort first, give Rakh and any other of the dead a decent burial, see to Rajira and Halil.

"We don't have time. The seed needs to get above atmos-phere, and I don't think she'll go unless you go with her." With the unseen network now on-line, his spoken speech had at last become wholly fluent.

"I can't just leave them, Sirru. What about Rajira? What about Halil?" she'd asked frantically, but the alien had only responded soothingly, "They will be all right; don't worry. Everything is under control now."

She had not found that reassuring. She was going to argue further, but then she'd looked up to where the seed's sails were fluttering in distress.

"All right. I'll go up with her. But then, let me come back, see that the people we've left are all right."

She'd emphasized the "we," but she did not think Sirru was listening. And she'd wondered how much any of them would really matter to him now that they had served his purposes.

Sirru had agreed, but once they were in space and on the newly arrived depth ship, Jaya had been sucked into a seem-ingly endless bustle of conferences and tests and meetings with her strange new kindred. The only spare time she had was spent sleeping, or standing for a few minutes by the view-port while the seed drifted alongside, her hands pressed against the invisibility of the screen like a young seal alongside a boat. They spoke, mind to mind, Jaya teaching the seed everything she knew about the world below.
When it is time for you to begin a new world, remember this. You may need this knowledge
.

And the seed had been totally compliant, drinking in information with all the eagerness of the young. But the seed's face was growing less human by the day, as though it was an effort to sustain it under the onslaught of the immense genetic changes taking place within, and what Jaya felt for her was responsibility and concern, not the love that she believed she should have felt for her daughter. Or even the affection that she had, come to that; felt for Halil.

At that thought, she experienced a measure of relief: she had spoken to both Halil and Rajira, now part of the new net-work. They were excited, and scared, and being well looked after as a crucial part of a new society. But would that society really be an improvement on the last? Jaya wondered. The
desqusai
seemed benign enough, but her relationship with Ir Yth hadn't exactly given her a high opinion of the
khaithoi
. She recalled Sirru's explanation of what was in store for Earth.

"Tekhei is in such a
mess
, Jaya. All these conflicts, these wars based on nothing more than aggression and territori-alism—"

"You're a fine one to talk! What about the
khaithoi%
at-tempt at genocide?"

"Don't worry, Jaya. Everything's going to be sorted out. No more wars, no more damaging diseases. The caste system will be dismantled. And we'll make sure the problems with the en-vironment are put to rights."

"Sounds wonderful," Jaya had said, skeptically.

"Don't you believe me?" He'd looked a little hurt.

"Oh, I believe you, Sirru." She'd reached out and touched his arm. "It's just—will you make the trains run on time, as well?"

He'd frowned. "Transport should be the least of your wor-nes.

There were some metaphors that emotional speech left un-touched, Jaya had reflected. Then she'd smiled and said, "I just mean that there will be a price, Sirru. Very few things come free. You know, there is a belief in my country that there are four ages of human existence, or
yugas
. And people say that these are the
Kali-yuga
, the last and darkest days. It does not make me very hopeful."

"Neither you nor I can say if that belief is true, Jaya. But I can tell you this-—there
will
be a price."

"Do you think this is the right thing to do, Sirru? To come to other worlds, take them over without so much as a by-your-leave? I know you say we are your kindred, but that doesn't mean a lot to us, you know. A lot of folk are going to think that you're here to exploit the planet."

"I know. But colonization is what we
do
. The drive behind our society is to expand always, to increase our cultural order. It is not economic—it is an overpowering sense of social duty. It
is dkarma
."

The familiar word had startled her, coming from alien lips. It seemed Sirru had learned something of her culture, at least. After that conversation, she had not felt quite so misunder-stood. Not all the old guard were gone, either: she had spoken also with Shiv Sakai, himself now a part of the network. She didn't dare ask how he'd managed that, but he seemed to be in his element. And Rakh, he had told her, now lay beside his brother on the shores of the lake, in peace at last. Jaya still grieved, but at least Rakh hadn't been left to lie on the stony hillside for the vultures and kites. The dead were always for-gotten in the midst of the making of history; Jaya was deter-mined that this would not happen to Rakh.

"Jaya?" Someone placed a bony hand on her shoulder, call-ing her back to the present. She came across to join the irRas: her own kind, or so they kept telling her. Everyone was very friendly, evidently anxious to make the Tekhein kindred feel less like poor relations. The visitors conversed in whispering, sibilant voices, their quills rattling like the wind in bamboo, sending careful modulations of emotion across the air.

The scale nano-armor that they had given her felt cool against Jaya's skin, and it sealed her off from their emotions. Unfortunately, she thought, it did not protect her from her own. Among the
desqusai
, it was difficult to pick out Sirru. They all looked alike to Jaya: tall, thin, pale, golden-eyed. This inability to recognize him made her feel sad, and some-how guilty.

Suddenly lonely, she went in search of him. She finally found him down by the growing tanks, peering in at the dense mass of foliage. Or maybe it wasn't foliage at all, but some-thing else: skeins of viruses, writ large, or some kind of em-bryonic life. She was coming to realize that she couldn't describe the world according to the old categories any longer, but she didn't know how to replace them.

The air in the growing chambers was fresh and green, like a garden after rain. Sirru smiled at her as she came in. "What's been happening today?" she asked him.

"Many things." Sirru sighed. "And none of them very in-teresting. I had reports to complete."

"How boring, to be an interplanetary colonist," Jaya teased. Sirru blinked.

"That depends on the planet. And you? How are you?"

"Me? I'm confused."

"Why?"

"I don't know what I'm supposed to do here. The seed is changing; I don't know how I'm supposed to help her, or how—oh, a hundred things confuse me, Sirru."

Sirru glanced at her with sympathy.