Qualea Drop (The Spiral Wars #7), page 18
In the Spiral, such things could be discovered of a species by asking its neighbours, who’d been there watching the whole thing over the past tens of millennia. But the reeh had defeated, annihilated or absorbed all of their neighbours, to the point that there were no witnesses left to ask.
The landing zone for the Angivid Temple was on a rooftop overlooking canyons of highrise steel. This was a lestis zone, and the lestis had been in Qalea far longer than humans. Chiri took guardianship of Taj’s bike in a squabbling mass of shrieks and complaints — barely up to Trace’s knee, they wore irregular scraps of clothing, some hoods, others small cloaks or vests, and alternated between two legs or four, long-eared and beady-eyed. Taj flipped one a coin, which it grasped upon the rider’s seat with fidgety little hands, then turned to shriek and complain to its companions among the other vehicles about whatever chiri thought good to complain about.
“How smart are they?” Trace asked as they picked their way between the other bikes, toward the road leading to the temple. “We don’t have them in Tarshin.” She'd done a lot of background reading on the southern city of Tarshin, for research.
“My dad always said you should treat them like kids,” Taj explained, waving away some reptilian tanifex who gestured at him with electronic displays, perhaps trying to sell something. “They’re not much brighter than your average five-year-old. They get real rough down in the lower zones, they’ve mobbed and killed some people, pulled their limbs off and stolen their stuff.”
"I don't see them in the Human Zone."
Taj laughed. "That's because they don't travel. They're territorial, they're not smart enough to ride bikes and shit. If they tried to take a territory in our space, they'd get dead real fast."
Trace thought about it, watching passing aliens. A trento just sat, looking over the bikes on the landing zone, a blanket over his legs and smoking a long pipe beneath his long snout. She'd gotten a similar vibe from many Qalea humans, but not all. "You don't like aliens?"
"I like aliens fine in their own damn territory," said Taj, stretching a stiff shoulder. "Just not in ours."
"Some of the aliens don't mind sharing with each other," said Trace, nodding at the mixed traffic around them. There were occasional aliens in the Human Zone on business, but nothing as mixed as this. There was no government to stop them living there if they chose. In lieu of a government, it seemed, the human population made that decision for them.
"Yeah, that's lestis," Taj said dismissively. "Lestis are weird."
The temple road was narrow, cluttered with foot traffic and the occasional ground vehicle, most barely faster than the pedestrians. There was a reason everyone flew in Qalea — cars weren't much faster than walking, and there was no grounded public transport. This wall of the canyon wasn’t far off vertical, an endless stretch of dilapidated housing, hanging off the brink of a sheer drop. A forest of coms dishes, wind turbines, air filters and sun awnings cluttered the cityscape, and everywhere was the vaguely foul smell of barely-processed waste. Fortunately for Qalea, a city with little public infrastructure, it did rain frequently, and the storage tanks were everywhere. But as always, systems malfunctioned, and in places suspicious streams flowed across the road, trickling onto the rooves of dwellings further down the slope.
Poverty wasn’t something most humans were familiar with. Hardship in human space was common, but even on Trace’s homeworld of Sugauli, a living could generally be made unless you’d royally screwed up your life, or events had royally screwed it up for you. On Sugauli, the truly poor had been regarded with pity or contempt, depending on whether it was deemed those poor had earned their misfortune. But here in Qalea, many were poor because the system simply did not provide enough wealth for all to partake in, regardless of how hard they worked. For some of Trace’s party, it was confronting. After Rando, Trace herself was used to it.
The reeh, it was becoming clear, had plenty of super-advanced worlds where the economics hummed at full intensity. When worlds faltered, like Eshir, it was because the reeh wanted them to. In human space, worlds or regions that did less well, by poor governance or some other misfortune, could always be abandoned by their inhabitants for someplace else. But in reeh space, and particularly for the native humans who’d been dumped here nearly a thousand years ago, that was not the case. The hand of reeh authority here seemed light in everyday life, but travel offworld was strictly forbidden, on penalty of death. The Reeh Empire, it seemed, did not want their various Eshir colonies to spread.
The Angivid Temple was accessible by stairs at the corner from the road, and Trace’s local-model visor highlighted an array of security sensors about the grand arch entrance. Foot traffic moved up and down, and several tall lestis stood on what might have been ‘guard’ — looming cloaked figures, their faces a singular, astonishing compound sensor, glistening like a deep-blue, ovoid crystal. Peaceful, Romki had assured her, and quite mysterious to their neighbours. Doubtless when the reeh had conquered them in the past, they’d not put up much of a struggle.
“Major,” came Styx’s voice in her ear, “I detect no primary lestis interlink systems currently within range. You will have to venture deeper into the temple.”
Trace smiled, finding Styx’s trepidation at human religious structures amusing. “Yes Styx, I will,” she formulated in reply. But to an AI, she supposed, human religion must have looked like a seething mass of organic irrationality where any crazy thing could happen.
They climbed stairs between steep walls, passing various of Qalea’s ten resident sentient species, then emerged onto a central courtyard. Overhead, flanking pillars turned into arches, in great spans across the grey, traffic-strewn sky. In the courtyard’s center, a large tree, with prominent roots that seemed to grow into the stone. A cloaked lestis pushed a broom amidst the visitors, sweeping leaves. About and beyond, high towers loomed, bright lights and alien symbols dim in the gathering pollution of a windless day. Already Trace could feel it stinging her lungs, and was thankful for the micros that protected all Fleet personnel’s lungs from inhaled gasses.
She paced a slow arc behind the tree, taking in the view. Impersonating an artist wasn’t too hard — being raised among mountains, she’d always loved a nice view, and if there were a few less people here she thought it would be a fine place to meditate. Qalea was crazy beyond the imaginings of most people back in human space, but on this trip she’d gotten used to that too.
“When did you learn to speak Hin?” she asked Taj, pulling the portable scanner she’d bought, and framing several simple photographs. ‘Rule of thirds’, Jokono had explained the principle to her, so that she didn’t look like a total fraud if someone asked to see her images. ‘Just make sure the image is composed of different things in proportions of one-third, and you’ll pass as a human artist, at least.’
“My Dad runs a small business,” Taj explained, hands in pockets as he looked around what was for him a familiar scene. “Parts fabrication. Some of his better customers are Hin, so he learned it. He doesn’t miss much, my Dad.”
Hin was Hindi. The dialect was strange, but Trace knew enough that with some intensive refreshers, and the memory-enhancers Doc Suelo had lent her, she could pass as fluent, as it was very close to Nepali, which she’d spoken more than English in her youth. The primary human language on Eshir was Arabic, which had morphed over a thousand years to be called Arga by the locals. It had been a surprise to them all when Styx had played them the first recording of the Eshir humans that she’d intercepted from a data-package on a further-out world. Most of the old Earth languages were still spoken somewhere in human space, though most had lost their utility after the death of Earth, with humanity forced to reorganise along military lines, including the embrace of a single tongue for efficiency. Many had been reduced to little more than museum status, kept alive mostly by scholars, artists and the occasional family heritage.
In Command Squad, ‘Leo’ Terez was fairly fluent in Arabic, it having been passed down as historical artefact on his mother’s side, while Irfan Arime had acquired some from one of those schools that encouraged the learning of an old language to keep human heritage alive.
So far the team had surmised that the krim’s human samples must have been taken in an arc from North India, across the Middle East to North-East Africa, as aside from Arabic and Hindi, humans here also spoke Oromo, Somali, Persian and some Hebrew. Astonishingly, there were mosques here, plus a few Hindu temples, and even the odd synagogue or church. One did not need to be a professor like Romki to find it astonishing that one should find so much old human history, lost to the majority of people in human space, still alive and thriving in the most alien, far-away corner of the galaxy imaginable.
“Major,” said Styx, “I can still find no reception on the sensitive lestis communications. You will need to move on from this area.”
“In good time, Styx,” Trace formulated. “Moving too fast could look suspicious.”
“Seriously, how did you do that?” Taj asked now, watching her closely. “Back, there, at the casino? You’re some kind of player, aren’t you? Maybe some kind of enforcer for the Families?”
Styx had told Trace a lot about Taj. She’d selected him from her network analysis, entirely on the basis of probability, she’d said. He was twenty-seven local years old, which in regular human years meant twenty-four. His various communications with his network of friends led Styx to conclude that he was an ambitious hard-charger up the ranks of the Families — a profile she’d taken input from Jokono in compiling. Such young men from modest backgrounds, Jokono opined, were more likely to take chances, and find the prospect of what Trace was doing exciting. Plus, he’d added with a paternal smile, a young macho bike courier, with hormones blazing, would be that much more receptive to her appearance.
Trace hadn’t been so sure about that — there’d been plenty of young men in the marines, before she’d acquired her reputation, who’d been less than thrilled to be upstaged by a woman. But from the way Taj looked at her now, she had to grudgingly admit that Jokono’s assessment may have been correct. She wasn’t used to that kind of look. She’d gotten it from some male marines for a time, but then she’d hit Major, and something had clicked in most male minds to remove her from the sphere of sexual potential. She’d liked that, in truth, because it stopped that animal part of her own mind from wandering, from tripping sideways into lust and desire as all healthy young peoples’ brains were wired to do. Stopping that, at times, had been nearly as intense a discipline as controlling fear under fire.
“I can’t talk about that,” she told him, framing her next photograph. A giant advertising blimp was passing, an airship the size of multiple football fields, sides aflame with dancing alien displays. Framed with the temple tree it made an impressive photograph, even for a novice like her.
“I want to do that too,” Taj insisted. “I can’t afford the augments, but Family Zurhan say they’ll pay for them, if I prove myself.”
Trace glanced at him, away from her photo. He was an averagely big guy, broad-shouldered, handsome in the way of a young man who kept his dark curls well styled, and spent a lot of time on his home gym. She thought he seemed pretty harmless, but her experience of young men was shaped by an adult life in the marines, and these things were relative. There were women less physically capable than her who might have preferred to keep clear of a man like this, with his biker clothes and crazy riding. A young daredevil who ran errands for a powerful Qalea family could probably get away with much, if he chose. Jokono, however, insisted this one was no psychopath.
“What would they want you to do?” she asked.
“Hard things,” said Taj, with an edge. “I could do it.”
“And that would be a promotion within the Family, would it? Becoming the muscle?”
Taj looked defensive. “It could be. I just know some of those guys. They get paid real good, they get all the best gigs. I know I’d be good at it. Most of those guys, they’re no tougher than me.”
“What if you were asked to hurt people?” Trace asked, returning attention to her photographs. “Or worse than just hurt?”
“Like you never have?” Taj asked, incredulously. “What did you just do to those three dicks at the casino? You were like swatting flies!”
“Hurting people is easy,” said Trace. “Some of these religious types…” and she waved her hand at the surrounding temple, “…they say it’s not easy, but they’re wrong. It’s the simplest thing if you’re good at it. The difficult bit is justifying it to yourself afterward. If you’ve got a good justification, and a strong mind, that can work too. But if your justifications are bullshit, pretty soon you’ll be bullshit. You’ll have to contort yourself to fit your bullshit justifications, and pretty soon you’ll just be a stinking pile of it, fit for nothing more than fertilising plants.”
“You’re not bullshit,” Taj retorted.
“How do you know? You just met me.”
“You’re too hot to be bullshit.” He said it with a young man’s swagger, and a dangerous smile, forcing that false certainty of youth.
“Hotness is the biggest bullshit there is,” said Trace. “If you’re going to start hurting people for money, you should get a better notion of what constitutes a moral center first.”
Taj’s smile faltered, then grew back double, with exasperation. “You’re super-weird, you know that?”
Trace considered her last photo, lips pursed. It was okay, she thought. No explosion of undiscovered talent, though. It was the kind of thing Erik liked to insist that she’d find if she looked for it. “Let’s check out the rest of this place. I heard there’s a heart stone in the temple center?”
The heart stone was located in a four-pillared stone room, deeper into the canyon side. Aliens filled the room, and on several raised platforms about a central stage, cloaked lestis sat by large stringed instruments, like giant lyres, only electric. On the central platform, encased in a faux-natural wooden throne, rested a giant crystal that looked remarkably like the faces of the lestis themselves — a great ovoid, shimmering blue. The electric lyres hummed with alien harmony, and a throbbing resonance echoed about the chamber. At first Trace thought it was some synthesised sound from the speakers. Then, as she and Taj pressed through the praying, swaying, murmuring aliens, she realised that the sound was coming from the direction of the crystal itself.
“Styx,” she formulated, “is this some kind of synthetic trick, or is the crystal singing?”
“It does not appear to be a trick, Major. The crystal is vibrating with harmonic resonance. This is not described in all the drysine recordings of crystal properties, but it is not beyond the realm of physical possibility.”
“Amazing, huh?” Taj leaned in to say in her ear, ignorant of her conversation. Much like a boy hoping a girl would be impressed by where he’d brought her on a date.
“Amazing,” Trace agreed.
“Major,” said Styx, “I am detecting protected lestis communications networks. If we had allowed the assassin bug to fly in here unsupported, it may have been neutralised and discovered.”
“Where should I release the bug?”
“Somewhere it can hide for an hour or two while I calibrate its systems for penetration. Lestis technological arrangements are quite remarkable.”
Trace reached into a jacket pocket, and held her finger before the small plastic vial there. Felt tiny, sharp feet clasp her fingertip, and as she strolled by one of the lyre platforms, she swished that hand absently at the hem of the lestis’s robe. The bug vanished, and she kept strolling, not needing to feign fascination.
Some of the aliens in the stone room appeared in standing meditation, trancelike as they swayed, and the harmonics throbbed in ears and bones. Others recorded on devices, like tourists anywhere. A trento stood with bony arms upraised, as though in prayer. Trace recalled what Lisbeth had said about the newly discovered history of the parren in the last centuries of the Machine Age, and how the deepynine queen Nia had found fascination with a parren scholar who claimed to have discovered a universal, mathematical baseline to describe the religious practice of all organic sentients.
Styx insisted that the drysines were certain they knew what all of this had been for. All existence, the fabric of space-time, the impossible complexities of quantum states, everything. Trace wondered if being so certain precluded one from partaking in the mystery of a place like this. Trace believed in certain larger truths herself, but she could not prove them. And perhaps if she could, she’d have no need of the wonder that she felt now.
“Do you find it beautiful, Styx?” she asked the drysine queen.
“Quite beautiful,” Styx agreed. But with Styx, one always wondered if she lied.
10
Romki wandered, local-made visor on, having only a very general idea of where he was but enjoying it more than was probably wise. The Major had promised him adventure, and adventure he was having.
Qalea was beyond his imaginings. Most of his scholarly career had been spent on civilised, organised human, tavalai or chah’nas worlds — mostly single-species dominant, mostly wealthy, and mostly nothing like this. Residents of Qalea, and Eshir most broadly, had more freedoms here than he’d thought possible under the reeh, save that the reeh had a way of simply ignoring things, a kind of laissez-faire disinterest that ranged in consequence from vaguely libertarian like Qalea, to broadly genocidal like Rando. The Reeh Empire model, he was beginning to suspect, was one of deciding the purpose or status of each member world, then letting that designated role play out with brutal disinterest for the fates of those involved.
Perhaps Eshir had surprised the reeh by doing relatively well — so many species all living together in apparent harmony. Probably that had something to do with the fact that none of those species were reeh, the empire’s master race having abandoned this place long ago, and taken most of its secrets and history with them. Their place had been filled by the rejects, escapees and refugees of other worlds, those that the reeh, for their own purposes, had allowed to slip through the net.
