Regeneration (Czerneda) (2 page)

T
HE PORTENTS WILL COME. And Change will follow, to take the landscape, to bring death.

Those who can flee, will.

And still that which is Dhryn must wait—too frail to risk confrontation—too slow to race others from the doom.

Only in the lull time, when the emptied land has finished dying around them, will the Dhryn venture forth. Scouts first, to taste the land, seek routes to what the Progenitors will crave. They will find where the great forests rot, bring the feast to sustain.

That which is Dhryn shall cleanse the land, removing debris, clearing blocked rivers. All will sustain the Progenitors as they
move
behind the rest.

Most will not complete the Great Journey, spent by the effort, worn by toil. Lost. Left. Remembered.

All that matters is the Progenitors reach Haven, the place of safety and plenty. There They will rest, setting the Path in memory, bringing forth new generations who will not know Change in their lifetimes.

Until it begins again.

 

 

 

“
A
RE YOU THINKING what I’m thinking?” Dr. Mackenzie Connor, Mac to those she intended to talk to more than once, gave her closest friend a wary look. She’d learned the hard way where such conversational gambits could lead.
Especially when Dr. Emily Mamani was
this
bored
. “That,” she ventured, “depends on what you’re thinking.”

That tilt of the elegant head, with that smile, spelled pure mischief. “Then you are!”

“Am not.” As this didn’t seem a particularly adult retort, Mac added primly, “I never think such things.”

Emily’s laugh, as rich and contagious as before, as always, warmed Mac’s heart. She wished it could erase the shadows clinging to the other woman’s cheekbones, haunting her eyes.
Time might do that.

“You’re allowed, you know,” Em continued, leaning closer. They were both sitting with their elbows propped on the dark, polished wood of the bar. The bar that stretched in a friendly manner right to the door.

The door Mac eyed wistfully.
She’d left so much work . . .

“Oh, no, you don’t,” Emily protested. “You promised.”

“So now you think you’re thinking what I’m thinking?” Mac asked, dragging her attention back to her beer. “Hah!”

“Hah, yourself. We get a night away from that bunch of loons. You promised.”

“They aren’t—” Mac stopped as Emily raised a shapely, black, and highly expressive eyebrow. True, Wilson Kudla, author of
Chasm Ghouls: They Exist and Speak to Me,
was presently conducting the third night of what boded to be a prolonged—and already very sweaty—exorcism attempt, having, like the rest of the Origins Team, become convinced the Ro were not beings to welcome under one’s roof. Or inside one’s tent.

Not that the rest of the team had tents,
Mac corrected hurriedly. Particularly tents full of perspiring Humans chanting themselves hoarse. “Not all of them are loons,” she qualified. “Archaeologists simply have their own approach to the work. You’ll get used to it.” This last hope echoed inside her half empty glass as Mac lifted it to her mouth. She took a long swallow, thought about it, then took another. A local brew. By now too warm by her standards, but with an excellent aftertaste. She squinted into the foam.
Honey?

Despite its colorful name,
The Takahe Nest
was little more than a long room, two thirds filled with wooden tables and assorted chairs. The floor was wood as well, rough and scarred by hiking boots—from the look of the trail leading past the bar, soaking wet and muddy hiking boots. The bartender, a big friendly man who’d introduced himself as “Kevin Maclean but not the actor,” claimed it had rained every day of the first fifty years the
Nest
was open. The occasional sunny day since hadn’t helped much. Mac and Emily had been directed here to experience firsthand a slice of the unique Fiordland atmosphere.

It had that.
Mac surveyed the eclectic and dusty mix of objects suspended from every exposed beam and wall. Perplexed-looking stags’ heads, antique hunting weapons, and odd-shaped drinking cups vied for space with what could only be bits and pieces of skims—most broken. The tip of a helicopter blade—Mac’s curiosity had made her ask what it was—easily two hundred years older than the pub itself, held place of honor behind the bar. Nor’easters ripped down the mountain valleys without warning, Kevin had explained cheerfully. The wind took its tithe from anything that dared be in the sky.

The clientele matched the bar.
Well, except for themselves.
Emily—in her long black shawl and yellow top, with a full red skirt swirling around her calves—stood out like some exotic flower transplanted in the wrong place. Mac herself, in dark pants, blouse, and sweater, had attracted only slightly fewer stares when entering. She eased her toes in the dressy sandals Emily had insisted she wear, missing her boots. The few folks here looked to be straight off a hiking trail or farm—people who worked with their hands and weren’t afraid of a little deluge.

Felt like home.
Although she’d never had a beer as a namesake before. Mac tipped the rest of her bottle of “Mac’s” into her glass and smiled.

“How long are we going to stay here?” Emily demanded in a low voice, with a gesture including more than
The Takahe Nest
.

Back to that again?
Mac held back a sigh. “Your guess is as good as mine, Em,” she said, truthfully enough.

The Gathering, the collaboration of every Dhryn expert the Sinzi could find within the Interspecies Union, had been—
disbanded wasn’t the right word,
Mac decided. Sent packing was more like it. The synergy provided by their being in the same place, namely housed at the IU Consulate for Sol System, had been irrevocably outweighed by becoming a single, convenient target. The Dhryn assault could have eradicated not only life on Earth, but the best chance of coming up with a defense for the rest of the IU—those thousands of worlds linked by the transects that permitted instantaneous travel between star systems.

“The sum,” Mac mused into her drink. “More than the parts, you know.”

“Gods, Mac. Philosophy on the second beer? Way too early.”

Mac’s lips twitched. “Sorry.” She ticked her glass against Emily’s. “Bad habit.”

“I’ll say. Kev!” In answer to Emily’s urgent summons, the bartender hurried over with two more bottles, lingering to trade smiles.
Mistake
. When Kevin turned away to serve other customers, Emily leaned well over the bar for a better look, lips pursed to whistle. Mac hauled her back to her seat. “Two beers are way too early for that,” she muttered under her breath, hoping no one else had noticed. Luckily, few of the tables were inhabited this early in the evening. A couple held what had to be groups of regulars, engrossed in their own conversations; the rest of the patrons stood around tables at the far end, where each solid
thunk
of dart into cork was followed by a roar—frequently accompanied by jeering comments about coordination and the lack thereof.

Emily settled peacefully. Then she leaned closer, her shoulder against Mac’s. “We don’t need to be here, Mac,” very quietly. “We shouldn’t be here.”

No chance she meant the pub this time either.
For all of Em’s insistence on a night out for the two of them, “just like any Saturday at Base,” this was looking more and more like a night out to air grievances Emily didn’t feel like discussing with anyone else.
One grievance in particular.

Mac swallowed the dregs of beer number two before taking a healthy swig of beer number three straight from the bottle. Nice and cold. “I know,” she admitted at last, pouring the rest slowly into her glass. “The Sinzi-ra—”

“The Sinzi-ra has already sent every other research team through the transects, each to a secret destination. Smart move. The right move, Mac.
They
know this place.”

There was only one “they” to Emily, anymore. Her by now familiar stress on the pronoun sent a chill down Mac’s spine.

In the six weeks and handful of days since Emily’s reawakening, her scars had healed, flesh had reappeared over her bones, and her skin had regained its normal golden glow. The streaks of silver in her glossy black hair were new, but she’d never been one to avoid an attractive contrast. The repairs to the damage left by the Ro—the new arms, abdominal wall, portions of her back, one cheek, internal organs—had been made with an ability to match detail beyond current Human medicine.

Only the way Emily flinched from naming the Ro aloud showed what hadn’t been fixed. So far, she’d remembered nothing of her time with the aliens.
It wasn’t her memory that had failed,
Mac corrected, studying her friend. Noad, Anchen’s physician-self, believed Emily’s mind continued to struggle for some means to process those experiences, based as they were on stimuli from an environment no Human sense had evolved to understand. No-space. The chosen realm of the Myrokynay, the Ro.

Emily did recall, with devastating accuracy, everything else. How the Ro had used her to help destroy the very life she’d thought she was sacrificing herself to protect. How, through her actions, the Dhryn had been unleashed . . . to decimate worlds . . . to threaten Earth herself . . . and now, to wait like some hidden plague, ready to strike anywhere in the Interspecies Union.

They’d
lied to her.

They’d
discarded her.

That simmering rage deep in the eyes meeting hers, even here and now, above the cheerful smile Emily shaped with her lips? Mac knew what it meant.

They
would pay.

Mac recognized Emily’s fury because it matched her own. No matter what anyone else thought of the Ro, no matter that there was division in the IU, the same evidence maddeningly taken as proof by both sides, she knew the Ro were the true enemy. They’d turned a sentient species into a deadly weapon, one they’d used to scour the Chasm worlds of life, one they were using again.

Some night out.
Mac looked away, letting her gaze travel the labels of the truly bewildering array of bottles lined up behind the bar. Single malt scotch, most with names as long and unpronounceable as those for local streets.

No luck.
After a moment’s struggle, she gave up.
Shouldn’t drink and read,
Mac chided herself, refusing to blame her still-tenuous ability to sort meaning from the written word.
No wonder the devout kept lists.
“Here,” she said at last, patting the bar. “Somewhere else. It doesn’t matter where we are, Em. Whatever gets the job done. At least here we have resources—the backing of the Ministry as well as the IU. A little patience, okay?”

That drew a steady look, a nod, and finally a chuckle as Emily let go for the moment. “Patience? Oh, please, Mac. Not
that
word again.” She wiggled her long fingers, gloved in textured black silk, in front of Mac’s eyes. “If they made these things properly, it wouldn’t take ridiculous, monotonous, ‘patience, patience, Dr. Mamani’ exercises! One dose of sub-teach, and I’d be performing solos on my cello.”

“Cello?” Mac snorted. Emily’s taste in music ran to a driving, heavy beat and flashing strobes, preferably delivered over a hot, crowded dance floor. She wrapped her own artificial hand around her glass and raised it, the faintly blue-tinged pseudoskin glistening as if with sweat.
Trick of the bar’s light.
Mac glanced at her friend and stiffened.

Emily was staring at her own hands, as if suddenly transfixed by them, her eyes wide and unblinking. “They missed one,” she mumbled in a strange, unsteady voice, bending then straightening each finger and thumb in slow motion, one after the other, again and again. “I told you, Mac. This isn’t right. They missed—”

“Emily, no.” Mac took Emily’s nearest hand, gently pushing it down to rest on the polished wood of the bar. “Em. Em!”

She shivered, then gave Mac a thoroughly sane look of annoyance. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Had a vision of you playing a cello, that’s all,” Mac lied.

She’d thought Emily had stopped this fuss over her fingers, the absentminded counting she’d continue until interrupted.
This quiet place was a mistake,
Mac decided.
Emily needed that hot dance floor, ideally crowded with young, athletic men. Distraction.

Then again, her fellow biologist was once more making come-hither eyes at their dubious but willing bartender, who, to be honest, was a few years past young and looked to lately watch more athletics than he performed.

Dancing was one thing.
This could get complicated
. “Em,” Mac warned.

“He’s cute.” Emily, perfectly capable of flirting and arguing at the same time, circled back to her subject like a shark circling blood spoor in the water. “Hollans. Ask him to get us out of the consulate.”