Playing God (9 page)

She led them out the door. The muscles in her back spasmed with tension as she hoped that none of the daughters or her sisters would come with them.

Alone in the yard, she put her arms around her daughters’ shoulders. She looked up. Three of the major moons shone between the ragged clouds, with two of the minors between them.

“Well, my own,” she said softly. “What do you think?”

Theia leaned her head on Praeis’s arm. “About the sky, Mother, or about our family?”

“Ah, I am transparent to you, my own.” She tugged Theia’s ear gently.

“I like being here,” said Res. “I feel…enveloped. Connected. Closer to everyone, even Theia. Why?”

Praeis smiled a little sadly. “We are not so careful of each other here. We know exactly who we are with, who is around us, who leads us. In the colonies we have to restrain ourselves more because we are surrounded by those who are not of our Great Family. We can only afford to let go for brief moments, as with the celebration when we heard of the Confederation treaty.” She watched the stars watch them all for a long moment.

“What if I pull you away from this natural closeness with what I do? I have already stood against my sisters this evening, and I’m afraid it will get worse.” She paused, and her skin trembled, but she said, “I could send you back to Crater Town. We have enough near family there to shelter you.”

“No,” said Res immediately. “We came to help you, Mother. How can we abandon you?”

You would not be abandoning me. You would be saving yourselves.
“I may truly need your help, my own. There may be questions I cannot ask and places I cannot go.”

“We are your own,” said Theia. “We will stand with you.”

Praeis hugged her daughters close and they stood like that for a long time and she closed her eyes so that she could stop her own tears.

Armetrethe looked through the slit window into the dark yard. She could just barely see Praeis and her daughters standing and watching the sky. Senejess stepped up behind her and watched over her shoulder. Their daughters were busy clearing away bowls and pushing the furniture back so they could lay out the sleeping mats and blankets for the night.

“She has not changed,” said Armetrethe. Her voice was low, but none of her anger was disguised.

“No.” Senejess laid a hand on her warm, dry arm. “Did you think she would?”

“I hoped.” Armetrethe’s stump flailed briefly. “For a moment, I thought she would open her heart.”

Senejess smoothed down the skin on Armetrethe’s good arm. “So did I. But we must keep our eyes open to what she really is.” She bared her teeth for a moment. “She is the loyal daughter of our Majestic Sisters.”

Armetrethe leaned heavily against Senejess. “When did I begin to see devotion to the Queens as a failing, Sister?”

“When Praeis let them order her to sacrifice Urisk Island,” answered Senejess softly. “The same time I did.”

A
RRON HAGOPIAN STARED DOWN
into the lumps of shadows that daylight would change into the
chvintz Rvi,
the Defenders’ quarter of the city. It was a clear morning. The late stars still shone over the balcony. Their light glinted on his helmet. Dawn was just a thin, white line on the horizon. This Earth was a little bigger than the Earth he’d come from, so its days were a little longer. Even after ten years, he still got up outrageously early.

The voices and clatter of predawn traffic filled the warm morning breeze. Getesaph called back and forth to each other, raucous, belligerent, and sometimes mind-bogglingly rude, but peaceful in a very city sort of way.

Should be inside. That data’ll be done cooking by now. I need a transmission in the pipe. No sense giving the funding panel extra ammunition.

He didn’t move. He gripped the balcony rail with his gloved hands and leaned over it, determined to soak up as much of the early-morning noise as he could hold.

One for the head mechanics. How many cases come in because they’ve got it bad for a noisy, smoggy, plague-ravaged, glow-in-the-dark planet?
His gaze drifted up to the stars again.
And what’s Lynn going to say about it?

He’d had no idea he was ever going to hear from her again. They’d dissolved into individual silences almost immediately after college. He certainly hadn’t expected a hywrite from her. He’d stared at it for so long on the comm screen at the outpost, he’d practically memorized it.

Arron:

I wasn’t sure what kind of facilities you’d have there, so you’ll excuse the lack of splash on this. I’m coming in with the Bioverse team. I’m a manager, and they’ve got me working on the evacuation. “Relocation” is what we’re supposed to call it. Either way. Some brilliance in the stratosphere decided we can’t hire planetside Humans, but I could use a brain dump from someone who’s been there before you take off for Whoknows.

Hope you’re willing,

Lynn Nussbaumer

Lynn. Lynn had become a corper, and she was on her way with the people who were destroying his life.

“Scholar Arron?”

Arron turned. The Dayisen Rual, Lareet and Umat, stood silhouetted in the arched doorway.

Arron smiled. “Dayisen Lareet, Dayisen Umat.” Dayisen was a rank somewhere around the level of colonel, except that it belonged to the entire family. Lareet and Umat were the
tvkesh chvaniff,
the outside sisters for the family Rual. Their children were raised primarily by their sisters and their mother. Their job was to make sure the family was fed, housed, and protected. “Morning’s light looks good on you.”

The sisters stepped onto the balcony.

“We are perhaps disturbing your meditations?” Lareet leaned her elbows against the balcony railing, twitching her ears toward the wind and noise. She was the shorter and pinker of the two. Even by Getesaph standards, her skin hung loosely on her, making flaps around her neck and wrists rather than the usual folds.

A set of particularly vehement blasphemies exploded from the streets. Lareet folded her ears down. “I sometimes worry about what you tell your employers about us.”

Arron laughed. “Nothing worse than you tell your Members of Parliament about me, I’m sure.” It was no secret that the Rual family agreed to host him because the parliamentary members their family had been assigned to wanted firsthand observations of a
man.

“Have you heard from your people yet?” asked Umat from the doorway. Where her sister was short, pink, and loose-skinned, Umat was tall, grey, and gaunt. Even her ears were thin. They were so sharply pointed that Lareet sometimes teased Umat that they could be used as spears against their enemies.

“No.” Arron rubbed his gloved hands together. “I’m going to the outpost today to see if there’s word. My department head promised to present my staying on to Bioverse as first-rate public relations. So, we’ll see.” He glanced at the two Getesaph. “You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

Lareet spread her hands. “There are some times when it is easier to remember that you are an alien than others.”

Arron smiled and looked deprecatingly down at himself. Years of fishing, farming, and anything else he could lend a hand to, across all the Hundred Isles, had turned him lean, tan, and corded. He’d always thought of himself as tall, but he could hide behind either of the sisters facing him. His thick work trousers and plain green T-shirt were a sharp contrast to their electric blue uniforms with green rank bands around their cuffs.

“Is there something you need?” he asked.

Umat caressed the threshold with one knobby hand. “Yes, there is. Our members have asked us to speak to you.”

Arron’s forehead wrinkled. “About what?”

“Scheduling difficulties,” said Lareet with careful blandness.

“Severe ones,” added Umat.

Lareet’s ears dipped. “Monumental.”

“Yes.”

Arron looked from one to the other. “What schedule are we talking about?”

There was now enough light for him to see the intensity of their expressions as they both looked straight at him. “The relocation,” said Umat.

Arron tried to see where this was leading, but couldn’t. “I thought the Confederation gave Bioverse total say over the relocation coordination.” He’d been stunned when it happened, too. He suspected Bioverse had insisted on it.

“Parliament ceded permission to the Confederation by a narrow majority,” Umat reminded him. “Now that the main Bioverse team has arrived, they have sent us the relocation schedule. It states that the Getesaph will not be removed until the last segment of the procedure.”

Pride of place?
Arron wondered. Lareet and Umat were both obviously waiting for him to say something. He just spread his hands and waited for them.

Lareet strangled a sigh. “The t’Theria are going to be among the first relocated. Once their daughters and carrying mothers are removed from all danger of retaliation, what will prevent them from attacking us?”

Ah.
“I don’t see how I can help with this,” he said carefully. “My department of the university has nothing to do with Bioverse.”

“But one of their coordinators is a friend of yours,” said Lareet.

Arron’s brows jumped up. “Lynn?”

Umat considered. “Is that the same as”—she paused, probably to make sure she got the pronunciation right—“
Manager
Lynn Nussbaumer?”

“Yes.” Arron glanced up, as if expecting Lynn to drop from the sky. “That’s her.”

Lareet nodded. “Our members would consider it a tremendous favor if you would speak with her and ask that the schedule be rearranged so that the Getesaph are evacuated first, or at least at the same time as the…t’Therians.”

She’d probably cut herself off from speaking one of the dozen or so insulting terms the Getesaph had for the t’Therians.

Arron’s gloves rubbed his clean-suit-covered forearms. “If Parliament is worried about the consequences of the evacuation, you shouldn’t go. There’s got to be a way the plague can be cleansed with the Ded—” he cut the word off. It was fairly widely known that the word
dedelphi
meant opossum in an ancient Human language. It was also fairly widely known that an opossum was a poorly regarded rodent. “There has to be some way to cleanse the planet with the Family and the Others on the ground. Humans are a clever bunch.”
Clever enough that they’ll kill what the Confederation has started without even realizing it. Why can’t they see that the Families have to shape their future without our interference? Especially our interference on such a world-shattering scale?

Umat’s pointed ears sagged a little. “Scholar Arron, I know you do not agree with this plan to house us in human ships while they cleanse the Earth and our blood for us, but that is the agreement we have reached. Our members favor this much of our Confederation agreements, and we do, too.” Arron glanced at Lareet, who dipped her ears in confirmation.

“It is only the timing we question,” said Lareet.

“It can be taken to the entire Confederation,” Umat went on. “But that might—”

“Renew old tensions,” Lareet finished the sentence smoothly. “If we speak the truth about the t’Therian intentions, they will claim we are hurling insults to break the Confederation and say we need to be coerced into cooperation.”

He might argue with the phrasing, but Arron couldn’t dismiss the conclusion. The enmity between the t’Therians and the Getesaph was a watchword. As far as Arron could determine, the Confederation was the first time the two Families had ever cooperated. The plague had accomplished what centuries of lesser threats had not. No one, however, was sure it had accomplished it firmly and finally.

“I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to convince Lynn of anything,” he said, more to the dawn than to the sisters waiting for his answer. “It’s been a very long time since we were…close.”

“We’re only asking you to try,” said Lareet.

Arron pushed himself away from the railing. “All right, since you’re asking, I’m agreeing.”

Umat let out a sigh of relief. Lareet laid a hand on his shoulder. “Thank you.”

Umat wrapped her arm around her sister’s shoulders. “We’ll find out where Manager Lynn is going to be based, so you can plan your trip. It will be somewhere in t’Aori.”

“You want me to go from the Hundred Isles to t’Aori?” Arron shook his head. It was easier to get between competing corporate enclaves on Earth than it was to get from the Getesaph archipelago to the t’Aori Peninsula. “Any chance of your members giving me clearance and papers?”

“I don’t think so,” Umat said. “They want this request kept as quiet as possible.”

I can understand that.
“All right. You find out where I’ve got to go, and I’ll get there.”

“We will owe you all thanks for this, Scholar Arron.” Lareet gave his arm a final, friendly shake. “Many times over.”

The sisters left him there. Arron turned around and faced the city again. Clouds obscured the stars now, but he stared at the sky anyway.

Lynn. He remembered hours of debates about everything their separate concentrations held. He remembered eclectic midnight feasts, way too much alcohol, and laughing at whatever occurred to them. He wondered what had happened to her, and what had happened to him.

Arron turned around and went back into his room. The university had paid for the double-thick filter doors and windows so he could have a place where he could take off his clean-suit without contaminating the entire house. The room had originally been a closet, so it was small by Getesaph standards. For a Human, though, it made an adequate apartment. A thick mattress lay next to the personal fountain Lareet had given him, saying she couldn’t understand how anyone could concentrate without the sound of water nearby. A desk and chair had been shortened to a more Human height by having twenty-five centimeters of their legs sawed off. His flat, shiny portable lay on the desk, surrounded by the paper notes he’d learned to keep. The walls were covered with flat pictures of snowcapped volcanoes, boat-clogged harbors, and portraits of families he had worked with. The wall next to his desk was taken up by a big, full-color, hand-drawn map of the Hundred Isles of Home.

Arron lifted the lid on his portable.
DATA CONFIGURED AND SLOTTED INTO REPORT THREAD FORMAT
, read the screen. He closed it down and put it into his backpack along with three old clean-suits to take to the outpost recycler.