The Rifter's Covenant (38 page)

“Sorry,” one of the
Marines on duty said, his demeanor humorously apologetic, but his stance quite
ready for action. “No one gets off here, not even Nyberg. Sovereign territory
of the Kelly.”

Feeling the
impatience of the people in the stalled pod behind him, Ivard controlled the
urge to argue and plead. Drawing in a deep breath, he said, “The interdict is
placed by them, not by us. Isn’t it? For protection of humans?” His heart
hammering, he waited for the Marine to check what he already knew was true. The
prospect of his being forbidden trespass as well accelerated his pulse, making
him wonder if the Kelly saw him as some kind of pet.

The other Marine
said, “Better check the system. The tube shouldn’t even have stopped here.”

Ivard held up his
arm, now a deep brown with the emerald ribbon of the Kelly Archon embedded in
his flesh. “You’ve heard, maybe, about this?”

The Marine narrowed
his eyes. “What’s your name?”

“Ivard Firehead . . .
Il-Kavic.”

The man flexed his
wrist slightly; then his demeanor changed and he glanced at the boswell, his
brows lifting. “Hmm. You’re permitted.”

Both Marines looked
at him oddly, their scents changing as well. The transtube doors hissed shut,
cutting off the sound of the buzzer, and the pod whooshed away. But Ivard did
not stop to assess. He ran to the lock and waited impatiently as the hatch
locked behind him. His nose twitched at the rush of rich scents. So the lock
was pressure-biased toward the Kelly side to prevent any of their atmosphere
from leaking into Ares. Then the hatch ahead of him clicked and opened.

Ahead lay three
large, strangely shaped warships, more resembling streamlined Kelly than the
thorny sea creatures that modern human ships evoked. Smaller ships clustered
around them. There should have been nine of these; he perceived the incomplete
pattern in which they lay. The blue flicker in his mind darkened and condensed.

Ivard inhaled,
rapidly sorting the complexity of scents until a Kelly appeared from behind a
storage pod, and Ivard stared. It was a singleton, something he’d seen only
once before, during their escape from Rifthaven. The Kelly slapped its
head-stalk against the storage pod as it came around the corner; an oily stain
on the pod carried its pungent odor to Ivard across four meters.

The singleton
honked a greeting, and Ivard hissed in shock. He couldn’t understand what it
said. The blue flicker bounced with laughter as the Kelly bent its head-stalk
into an expression of apology and motioned him to follow.

Its gestures at
least were familiar, and Ivard understood that he’d been silly to assume the Kelly
all spoke the same language. Humans didn’t. He’d heard that a lot of Downsiders
didn’t know Uni, and only spoke one language. No Rifter spoke fewer than two,
and usually more. He wondered if the Kelly language he knew was their
equivalent of Uni.

The Kelly led him
to the closest of the larger ships and then briefly caressed the ribbon on his
wrist, two of the blue eyes under its lip-folds gazing up his arm into his eyes
as it did so. It left him and waltzed away as the lock dilated silently.

The inner hatch stood
open, and Ivard stepped into the ship. Then he stopped, trying to make sense of
what he saw. The corridor was wide and straight, but the walls looked like
polychrome cheese, porous and fissured in a pattern that slipped away from his
understanding at the same time his eyes tried to follow it. A faint pulse of
Kelly music drifted down the corridor from a distant source.

The blue flicker of
the Archon’s presence whirled about in agitation; never before had Ivard been
so aware of its opacity, the conviction that it enclosed more than he could
sense. He tried to trace the pattern with his fingers, in response to a sudden
surge of almost-meaning from the Archon, but a warning tingle made him pull
away. He controlled the nascent blister and moved on.

A come-along
flickered ahead of him, a human artifact out of place among the strangenesses.
As he followed it, he frantically sorted the scents that rolled in on him, ever
stronger and more complex. A hatch opened for him and he entered a large
chamber occupied by several Kelly trinities. Portus-Dartinus-Atos was the only
one he himself recognized, but the blue flicker swelled and gyrated violently
as he perceived an aura around one of the trinities. The Portus trinity
gestured and honked at him, but before he could reply, his lips tingled, the
membranes in his nose swelled, and his eyes itched as the scents began to
overwhelm him.

He controlled the
physical reaction, but the mental overload was too much. He could not sort fast
enough; he intuited that scent-sorting, a task easy enough in the scent-poor
human biosphere, was just an analogy for what he only thought he had learned to
do. The meaning began to leach out of the scene before him. He tried to reach
Vi’ya for help, but that avenue was blocked by the tall, smooth columns of red
and blue that sprouted up from the deck to spread his fingers apart with their
icy coolness while gray boxes tasting of sandpaper kneaded rubbery spikes
against his legs and a complex mesh of minutely articulated musical notes wrapped
itself around his skull and blew hollowly through his eyes into his head.

The blue flicker
whirled about imploringly and dove off in a direction even more difficult to
follow than the first time, when Portus-Dartinus-Atos had twinned the Archon’s
genome and completed his healing.

Ivard remembered
the one time he’d taken brain-suck, on a dare from Jakarr—Greywing had finally bunked
the old scug out for that. This was similar, and the tag end of Markham’s
explanation, while he’d talked him down, came back to him.
“They call it synesthesia. Everybody does it without knowing. It’s the
basis of language. Brain-suck just pulls it up out of the limbic system where
your conscious mind can see it and use it.”

The blue memory
surfaced again, and this time Ivard saw where it went. He followed and found
himself in a huge space where all his senses formed a rich unity, untrammeled
by the walls that conscious experience throws up between them. He would never be
able to describe this experience to anyone—language was too coarse a sieve to
catch it.

After a time he
rose back to the intellectual levels of his mind, and now his awareness was
clear and sharp. The confusion of his senses yielded to a complex but
meaningful fusion that Ivard found he could only sustain by a process analogous
to unfocusing his eyes. The imposition of logic and reason destroyed the
meaning rising from the deep levels that made him human.

“Nor can the
fountain describe the water,” said the central trinity, whom he now knew to be
the Elder of the Race. But threy did not only speak. Threy danced, and sang,
and scented the air in triple complexity, and the meaning was far more than the
words his conscious mind insisted on.

Ivard fathomed how
limited he, and every human, must seem to them. For intelligence has limits,
which all sophonts reach early in their rise to knowledge, but emotion, the
wisdom arising from the unity of sensation which is the fount of language, does
not. And the Kelly had a million years of emotional evolution beyond humanity.
They were a synesthetic race, communicating in a way that made human language
seem like the babbling of a small child by comparison. And Ivard realized he
was wrong, that he did not know the Kelly equivalent of Uni, but that the
language he spoke, better than any other human could, was but the crèche talk
of his alien friends, used by Kelly in their long infancy before they were
coordinated enough to truly communicate.

Ashamed, he felt
tears burn his eyes. But then the Kelly swarmed about him, and he found himself
enwrapped by a three of threes, their love inflowing all his senses. Within, the
blue unfolded, and he gazed in awe down the long paths of triune genetics to
the dawn of the Kelly race, and knew himself, transformed by the mystery of New
Glastonbury, a real part of the Anamnesis.

He was not a pet,
nor an object of pity. He was Ivard Firehead, now truly of the phratry of the
Eldest.

o0o

Vi’ya sat down
opposite Lokri. Unhindered by the dyplast wall between them, his emotions
battered at her, like a badly tuned harp played much too loud.

His light gray eyes
were bloodshot, the skin around them bruised-looking. “Vi’ya.”

Gone was the drawl,
the ironic amusement that had shaded his tone before. The word came out
harshly, midway between an accusation and a plea.

She had no progress
to report, despite hours of patient noderunning. Rather than speak those words
so baldly, she said, “Did Marim give you an appropriate description of our
mission to Omilov’s Urian mystery, or was it merely a long and colorful
exercise in opprobrium?”

He smiled faintly,
but she felt the impact of his despair like the thunder of drums.

“Actually, she was
somewhat subdued,” he said. “She get into trouble?”

“Not yet.
Cheating,” Vi’ya said. “When she does, I suspect it will not be at the hands of
the authorities. Just her victims.”

Lokri grinned. He
was also notorious for cheating, but only when there were no stakes except
amusement—or sex. He waved a hand dismissively. “Might do her good to get
thumped. For a day or so, anyway.” He sat back, his eyes narrowing. “She did
give me a clear rundown. Clear enough.” He paused to draw in a slow breath.

Vi’ya experienced
the bloom of hope that he tried so hard to choke off. The effort he expended caused
nausea to curdle in her gut. “You remembered something,” she prompted.

His eyes lifted,
his mouth pressing into a thin line. Then he said, “Yes. Conversation the night
before they were killed.” He looked away, then back again, wry self-mockery
slanting his brows. “I was young and naive, and I wanted—very badly—to go to
the Naval Academy on Minerva.”

Vi’ya did not miss
the slight defensive tone: they were Rifters, after all, and no one had been
more fluent about the perfidy of the Panarchy (and the Navy in particular) than
Lokri.

“So did Markham
once,” she reminded him. “Were you thrown out as well?”

He shook his head.
“Never made it that far. If you test well, you’re in, and they take care of you.
But getting there to take the test was expensive—Minerva’s antipodal to
Torigan. It was an investment by families, or by patrons. My family thought it
a waste of time. If I wanted to fly, I could join my mother in shepherding
students to ancient trash heaps on worthless worlds.”

“It was a subject
of contention,” Vi’ya said.

“A cold way to put
it, considering the fights,” Lokri said with a too-brief flash of his old
insouciance. “Anyway—the reason I’m dredging up this tedium—the night before
the murder, it came up again. Mother had recently returned, and my father had
been drinking. It wasn’t anger for once. He was smirking about something. He
turns on me and says something like, if I thought I was such a hot pilot, I
could tell him what a fractal spectrum was, and where to find an example.”

Vi’ya nodded. “Go
on.”

“Well, I gave him a
school definition of a fractal spectrum, how it was a laboratory phenomenon,
but halfway through he started in on how I wasted my time, his time, the
family’s time . . . .” He lifted one thin shoulder. “Never mind. The thing is,
I’d forgotten all about that until Marim threw that phrase at me the other day.
I suppose it’s unlikely there is any connection with the murder. Or anything
else.”

“As it happens,”
Vi’ya started—then without warning, the Eya’a were in her mind.

We separate one-patterns. We hear the
one-in-three contemplating the distant-sleeper while in sleep. She hears a
distant one-pattern, the same one-pattern Vi’ya hears while in sleep.

Vi’ya shielded her
reaction.
Is the one-in-three afraid?

Her pattern is afraid.

Is his pattern still in sleep?

His pattern is not in sleep, it moves in
direction of the three-ones.

Disentangling the
Eya’a’s random use of gender pronouns was an automatic reflex by now. Vi’ya
sent a calming thought:
Celebrate the
one-in-three being with the three-ones. This is amendment for him.

We hear the three-ones, we celebrate new
word-nexi, we share thought coloration and memory of the distant-sleeper . . .

They were going
into what Vi’ya thought of as Suneater mode: they would repeat everything they
had gleaned of the distant Urian construct. Vi’ya had learned to shift her
attention away, permitting the double voices to whisper in the back of her
mind, like a vid that had not been shut down.

She opened her eyes
to find Lokri watching her curiously. “Something wrong?” he asked.

“No. Eya’a and
Ivard. To resume. When we first returned to this station, I ran a search on
fractal spectrums, thinking as you did that it was sufficiently unusual to
cause some kind of interest.”

“And?” he asked.

She shook her head.
“Nothing beyond academic speculations and definitions.”

He sat back,
rubbing his eyes. “Then there’s nothing more to pursue, is there?” His voice
was almost too light to hear.

She hesitated, not wanting
to raise false hopes, except wasn’t even false hope better than this existence?

“It’s little,” she
said slowly. “And in light of what you just told me, perhaps it’s too little.
But I would not call it nothing.”

He looked up. “What
do you mean by that?”

“Just what I said.
There is too little information. I find it unusual that so little information
on this topic can be located, particularly in light of the very recent
discovery of the Suneater and its fractal spectrum.”

Lokri still rubbed
his eyes, an absent movement, as if it could smooth the headache that she could
feel. “But it would take a hundred years to dive through all the data if a
straightforward search doesn’t work.”