Shaman (24 page)

“The history of our race, preserved for us against time,” whispered Parsa and moved past Rhys into the chamber.

Sense-tiles decorated a significant portion of the free wall space at roughly shoulder height and, within row upon row of carved-out niches in those walls, were globes and cubes and stacks of tiles—the archives of the Tsong Zee.

There was no doubt, Rhys thought as the Tsong Zee all brushed by him to view their heritage, that they were the rightful heirs, for there was also a mural for those merely sighted. It scrolled across the back of the dais in a colorful tableau peopled by individuals who were doubtlessly the ancestors of those whose encoded sense memories had led the way here.

“Sir, I don't like this.” Yoshi's voice was the merest whisper, almost lost in the articulations of Tsong Zee and Human alike as they surveyed the room. “Three of the diggers have gone back into the corridor. I think they're plotting something. I can feel it.”

“Ah, but what can they do?” Rhys asked absently, his eyes on Gedde Kuskov, who was making it his personal business to record the find on holoscan.

“Sir! One of them is the demolitions expert. They have explosives!”

He gaped at her blankly for a moment. Of course, they had explosives. They were prepared to dig, to remove impediments. Rhys launched himself back toward the tunnel, not even thinking what he might hope to accomplish alone if the men were dangerously inclined. Of course, he was not alone, Yoshi was right beside him. He almost paused to tell her to stay, but one glance at her face was enough to save him the futility of that exercise.

The diggers hadn't gone very far down the tunnel; he found them a few meters along it, huddled over the work of the demolition expert, Quozel. They blinked guiltily in the white light of their collective torches, but offered no apology for the small, but potentially dangerous device at the center of their scrutiny.

“What are you doing?” Rhys asked, as if it wasn't perfectly obvious.

“You know what we're doing, Dr. Llewellyn,” said one of the men. He stood, straightening as much as he could, his back pressed into the wet curve of the wall. “You know what we have to do. This Shrine has to be destroyed.”

Rhys felt sweat bead on his upper lip and tasted fear, acrid, on the back of his tongue. His kilt itched abominably. “And will you destroy the Tsong Zee with it? Destroy us? Destroy your own colleagues? Dr. Kuskov?”

“We'll convince them to support our story—that there was no White Shrine, that it was just a hoax. Then it'll be our word against theirs.” He jerked his head toward the Shrine.

“And mine. And Yoshi's. And you can't be sure that all of your colleagues are going to see this the same way. You ought to see them in there. They've discovered something profoundly important. Something they'll not be easily convinced to destroy, I think. As for me, I've no inclination to let you cast me as the Wolf of Badenoch. I'll torch no cathedrals, gentlemen.”

The digger's glistening face flushed and he snapped at Quozel, who had stopped his work to listen. “Get that finished!”

The tech didn't move. The device cradled in his hands, he glanced from his fellow to Rhys to Yoshi. “He's right, Troy. We can't count on support from the whole team. You know that. They didn't want anything to do with this. What makes you think they'll keep their mouths shut? And Dr. Llewellyn —”

“Then maybe we have to force their mouths shut.”

Quozel waved his little bomb in the air. “You mean
kill
them? Holy Moses, Troy—you're crazy! I'll blow up the whole damn mountain, but not if they're still in it.”

Troy dropped to his knees beside the technician. “Would you rather lose this planet to them?” His head jerked toward the cavern. “Would you rather have to pack up your life, your family, everything you've worked for the last—what—ten years? Have you thought about where you'd go? What you'd do?”

“Have you thought about where you'd go or do with a dozen murders on your conscience? Good Lord, Troy, think of it!”

Indecision. It was there for a split second in Troy's face, then buried in a slide of anger.

No, not anger, strictly, Rhys realized—there was an unhealthy amount of fear.

“There's no guarantee you'll have to leave Velvet,” he said quickly. “The negotiations aren't finished yet. Not by a long shot. But if we earn their distrust, it will all be over.”

“It's all over, anyway, if we negotiate. We could end up a slave race, our businesses, our lives owned by the Orcas.”

Orcas? A frisson of recognition scurried up Rhys's back.

“Is that what Beneton told you, Troy? That the Tsong Zee meant to enslave us? Are you doing this as a favor to him, or did he pay you something as well?”

The digger's face blanched, sweating like the pale stone walls. “How did you —? It's not the money. I'm just protecting what's mine. What's ours.” He jerked his head at his companions.

“But there is money, isn't there, Troy? Destroy the Tsong Zee's chance of ever proving they lived on Velvet and what? What did Beneton's people offer you?”

Troy would have had to have been senseless not to feel the eyes of his cohorts burring into his skin.

“Yeah,” murmured Quozel. “Yeah, Troy, what are you going to get out of this?”

Troy's eyes flicked to Quozel's face, then back to Rhys. “A life, that's what they offered me. A life. Which is more than I'd have if we let
them
lord it over us. I don't want to leave here and I don't want to live like a serf or a sharecropper. This is the only way out.” He pointed at Quozel's little bomb.

Rhys unclenched his jaw. “So you're willing to start a war? What kind of a life are you going to have in the middle of a war, Troy?”

The digger blinked.

“Ah! Hadn't thought of that, had you? What did Beneton tell you—that the nasty aliens would just slink off without a fight? Tell me, Troy, have you ever been in a war?”

“No. Of course not.”

“It's not pleasant. People die. Lots of people. People you know. People you love. You know what this planet was like after what they did to it. It was virtually dead.”

Troy snorted. “One more reason not to hand it back to them.”

“They're a different people now. They've learned their lesson about war. What have we learned?” He felt his temper fraying. “Come on, man! Didn't you learn anything from their example? Didn't you shake your head over what they'd done to this world?”

The digger stepped toward him, meeting him nose to nose. “I have lived here since I was five years old. I fell in love with this place the moment I floated down the chute and set my feet on that black soil. My wife was born here—one of the first. This place has been my career, my life. All my memories are here. All her memories. We can't throw that on a ship and transport it to another world. Can you understand that, Dr. Llewellyn?”

Rhys felt a wave of empathy engulf him. Pa-Loana had been the closest thing to a homeworld he had known since he'd left his academic post on Newscot to work for Tanaka Corp. The Pa-Kai had become his kinfolk, the anchor to his wanderings. He hadn't lived somewhere since he was five years old, but he knew the feeling.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I can understand.”

“The way I see it,” said Troy, “there are a handful of choices. Either the Tsong Zee go and we stay, the Tsong Zee stay and we go, or we share the land. Do you think the Tsong Zee will go?”

“Not if they can help it.”

“Can you guarantee they'll let us stay here with them—free, independent? Can you guarantee this won't erupt into a war if we refuse to leave?”

“I can't guarantee they'll let us stay. But I can guarantee that if we do stay, we'll be free. They're not in the business of over-lordship. As to war, well, that seems to be in your hands, at the moment.”

“No guarantees—no discussion. We have nothing to talk about, Doctor.” Troy turned back to his group of co-conspirators and plucked the explosive from Quozel's hands. “Is this ready?”

“It—it doesn't have a timed detonator. Look, Troy, this is —”

“What does it have? Will it explode on impact?”

The tech's eyes widened and his mouth dropped open. “Uh, yeah, but —”

Troy moved with amazing speed, considering the tight quarters they hunkered in. He lunged at Rhys, nearly throwing him off balance and scaring a dainty shriek out of Yoshi.

Rhys, never one for physical skirmishes, desperately tried to block his path, throwing a counter-lunge into his rib cage and praying he wouldn't drop the explosive. It was a small thing—just a little ball of innocent-looking metal and plastic—but Rhys had no doubt whatever that it could bring the cavern roof down or, barring that, blow the group in the tunnel to kingdom come.

His shoulder pressed into the digger's gut, he begged superior traction from his brogues. “Don't make yourself a hired assassin!” he grunted, digging in. “Talk to the Tsong Zee! Know them!”

“Get-out-of-my-way! I have to do this. I have to! I won't leave, dammit! I won't leave! I'll get that Shrine if I have to go up with it!”

Rhys flailed with his left arm, his questing hand at last laying hold of Troy's wrist. He gripped tightly—but not enough, he hoped, to make the hand drop its lethal burden. He heard the group behind Troy gasp. Someone scurried away down the corridor toward the cave entrance.

“Will you die, then?” Rhys asked, his voice muffled, strained. “Is Beneton worth dying for? I notice
he's
not here. He's not prepared to die. Why should you die for him?”

“Not Beneton—Velvet! Velvet's worth dying for!”

Rhys twisted his upper torso, raising his head. He could just look Troy in the eye. “Will your wife think so, Troy? Will she? Which would she rather have—exile with you or a home without you?”

He had gotten through—he could feel it in the sudden, trembling stillness of the other man's body. He pursued the point. “You're a young man, Troy. Your wife—she must be about Yoshi's age, eh? You throw that bomb, you'll be giving her an awfully long life without you... or with someone else.”

He hazarded a glance back over his shoulder. Yoshi was still there, her pretty face almost devoid of color, her eyes riveted on the explosive. Behind her, he could make out the gleam of light on jet black skin, the glitter of pastel eyes, bright ripples of cloth. He wondered how long the Tsong Zee had been there.

Troy let out a grunt of humorless laughter. “Looks like I'm dead, anyway. They'll kill me the moment they get the chance.”

“What do you say, Brasn?” asked Rhys in Tsuru. “Troy wants to destroy your Shrine because he doesn't want to leave Tson. He thinks you're here to kill him.”

“No,” said Brasn quietly, shaking his head several times for emphasis. “We are here because we sensed your physical distress. We have no wish to kill Digger Troy. Yet, neither have we any wish to lose what we have waited so long to find. We have what I believe you call a ‘dilemma.'”

At that one word, uttered in perfectly coherent English, Troy's body stiffened, beginning to quiver anew. “What'd he say? What'd he say?”

Rhys repeated Brasn's words in English. The quivering increased.

“Well, there it is, Troy. They don't want to have to stop you and I'm not sure I can. That leaves Yoshi. She's not much of a warrior either, I'm afraid.” He glanced at Troy's sweat-coated face then back at the girl standing behind him, her eyes on the explosive. “Look at her, Troy. She's nineteen. That's a marvelous thing, to be nineteen. You remember—the beginning of everything. The end of waiting for adulthood. That's a powerfully great thing to put to an end. Do you want to do that to Yoshi? Do you want to bury that girl under a ton of rock? Will you be a hero if you do that, d'you think? Or will you be something else?”

Muscles relented, softened in Rhys's grip. He kept his eyes on the other man's, gradually loosing his hold on the sweat-soaked wrist. He felt the little metal sphere pressed gently into his palm.

“Oh, Lord,” mumbled the digger. “Oh, Lord, I'm ruined.”

Rhys took a deep breath. “No, I think we can all agree there were extenuating circumstances. Can't we?” His glance brushed the others—Quozel, Yoshi, the Tsong Zee, now fully visible directly behind her. He got consenting gestures from all.

He handed the bomb past Troy to the technician. “Disarm that, please.”

“Yes, sir!” He fairly leapt at it.

Rhys wanted no more than to dissolve into a plaid puddle, but couldn't afford to, yet. One of the diggers was missing, the lone escapee. He shook Troy's shoulder lightly. “One of your men took off. Is he on Beneton's payroll too?”

Troy glanced guiltily at the group of tense faces and nodded.

“Speaker Rhys,” said Javar from behind him, “there is nothing we can do now about that man. Whether he has found escape or ambush or ally, we are powerless. But there is still the Shrine. Won't you come and see all that we have found?”

Rhys nodded. “I'd like that.” He studied Troy's face. “Will you be all right?”

Quozel stood and moved to his friend's shoulder. In the light of torch and light-disk, his face shone with a fine dew of sweat. “He'll be fine,” he said, and put a steadying hand on the other man's arm. “I'll take care of him.”

They made their way back to the Shrine, emerging from the tunnel into what now, with braziers lit, looked like a cave of pale, shifting liquid. The Tsong Zee turned as one to face Rhys and Yoshi.

“Fear tastes the same on all tongues,” Javar told him. “Through you, we knew Digger Troy's fear—smelled it, saw it, heard it through your ears, tasted it in your mouth. We had not believed a Human capable of such attachment to Tson.”

“Nor had we anticipated,” added Brasn, “that a Human would be willing to fight for our interests. Why have you done this? That man would not have harmed you, had you agreed to let him destroy our Shrine as he wished. And Humans would have benefited from its destruction.”