alt.human (28 page)

I was unsure. Harmony seemed such a tease: a mirage held just out of reach, a seductive rumour that we might pursue and never find. But the alternative? First Angiere and now Laverne. Someone wanted rid of our kind; a watcher faction called the Hadeen, according to some. We did not know who these Hadeen were, and we did not know why they wanted us gone. Realistically, we would probably never know these things, we were just tiny players in a vast, unfathomable game.

But what we did know was that if our pursuers wanted to wipe us out they would seek us, find us, destroy us. No question.

So: pursue a sliver of a dream, or hole up somewhere as securely as possible?

One night I took watch with Frankhay. At first I thought he had fixed it so he would have one more opportunity to intimidate me, this having become something of a sport for him on our travels. It wasn’t until much later that I could reflect on this period and see it as one of growing mutual respect. Between us, we had the leadership of our ragged group. He was the natural leader of the Hays, their clan-father; and our small band seemed to turn to me, just as the clan had back in Cragside, when the watchers had taken our elders. Taking every opportunity to harry me showed Frankhay’s awareness of that; it was his attempt to assert authority over someone who was fast becoming his equal.

That night I was on my guard, wary of being alone with him. He was still an exotic creature, a flamboyant man, full of bragging and posturing. He had a cold edge to him, and I felt that he was perhaps the most dangerous man I had ever encountered.

That night, we were camped out in a hollow scooped out of a scarp of limestone hills that reminded me of Cragside. The woods here were ancient and mixed; they looked genuinely wild, without the monoculture, the sterility, the glint and scuttle of bots, the absence of scrub and waste matter we had come to expect. Still, we could not relax too far. Even in the wilds, there were dangers.

We had come across ag-bots that appeared to have gone feral, tending little plots viciously with no apparent cause or reason, just programmed routine and behavioural patterns.

We had come across great fleshy plant-traps, bulging and pink and covered in bristles that glistened in the sunlight. The first we found was a curiosity, as was the second. The third had the half-digested carcass of a young deer impaled on its bristles, and as we passed, the deer turned its head to us and emitted a piercing screech unlike anything I’d ever heard.

I wondered how long it had been there, and how long the thing would keep it alive as it slowly absorbed the deer into itself.

And I wondered if we would have suffered a similar fate if we had been just a little slower on that first night in the wilds, when the forest clearing had tried to absorb us.

We passed through a tract of forest that was the scene of some form of biological battle, the trees skinned over with jelly-like scabs. An alien growth, a disease... none of us knew. Here, there was no bird or insect life and the air smelled of rotting flesh. We hurried through, and for a long time after were fearful that these rancid growths would break out on us, too.

B
UT
F
RANKHAY...
F
RANKHAY
, nest-father of the Hay clan, lord of the Ipp known as the Loop, a man clearly not averse to dealing with aliens and yet fiercely independent even of the other human clans of Laverne.

He sat on a rock, examining a long-snouted handgun in the light of the near-full moon.

I had just completed a tour of the camp, checking for
anything
– anything changed, anything different, anything that might turn out to be a new kind of threat we hadn’t encountered before and so hadn’t known to check for. Laverne seemed so far away, so long ago.

Frankhay looked up, nodded, shuffled aside to make room.

I sat, and in the sharp, silvery light, an autumn chill adding a bite to the air, I saw Frankhay differently. Ask me any time before how old he was and I’d have said maybe forty years, his hair turned prematurely white or perhaps even deliberately bleached. Ask me that night, as he turned to me and the lines on his face were etched deep by the moonlight and his eyes just looked
tired
, and I couldn’t have said.

Frankhay looked old. Frail, even. Had he always been this way, or had the journey done this to him?

“!¡
authoritative
¡! We talk tomorrow,” he said. “All of us. We need to have it out, purge the wound.”

I nodded. It was time for that debate. Settle somewhere for the winter or continue to seek Harmony? Seeing Frankhay that night, I wondered if he had the strength to resist the challenge of Herald or one of the others, the strength to continue leading. It was only then that I really appreciated how much I relied on him as a leader.

“!¡
supportive
¡! We need to,” I agreed. “There are too many grumbles. People have such short memories.”

“Shortness of memory’s not such a bad thing, sometimes,” said Frankhay. “It can help you focus on the now and what’s ahead.”

“!¡
musing
¡! We need to hang onto the past, too,” I said.

“Aye, but not cling to it, boy. What’s now is what matters.”

I peered at him. “What
is
now?”

“!¡
pensive
¡! Now’s about holding it together,” said Frankhay. “Now’s about us being the only survivors of our kind that we know of. That’s one almighty responsibility, boy.”

For a while we shared silence. Then, “!¡
hesitant
¡! You know about the guardians?” I asked. “Callo. Sol...”

Frankhay remained silent, and so I continued.

“!¡
confused
¡! Sol was never the same after the watchers took her. It was as if they’d broken her. Or replaced her... When she died: she was a guardian like Callo, some kind of engineered being in human shape. I saw her insides. I still don’t know if that was the same Sol or if it was a substitute they sent back after taking our real clan-mother.”

“!¡
suppressed emotion
¡! It was Sol,” Frankhay said, in a strained voice.

I stared at him.

“Sol was always that way,” he said. “A guardian. But it didn’t make her any less of a person. It didn’t make her without feelings, or the capacity to love.”

And so I learned of the true nature of my clan-mother, from the man who had loved her and discovered her secrets and then lost her.

R
EED
T
RADER GREW
up on the streets of Laverne. By his own admission, he was at best a rough diamond, a boy with a fast wit and a faster temper and a determination never to come off worst in anything. His carefully applied brutality and his sharp judgement of when to push an advantage home and when to appear to yield lifted him through the ranks of the street gangs until, by the age of fifteen, he led the Hays, a mob renowned for its viciousness and efficiency. They were the only human gang that dared run the hookers and drug rings in Central and Precept, usually the preserve of craniates or joeys, or one of the few other species that dared go up against the watchers.

His rise was secured when a pack of joeys found him in the backroom of a bar just off Precept Square one day. Almost as soon as they cornered him, they had him up against a wall, his feet off the ground, suspended by the wrists so that he was face-to-face with the leading alien, a scrawny, ceiling-high male with loose jowls and an all-over covering of grey bristle.

They were poised to spike him, poisoned talons at the ready, and Reed knew he had to come up with something. “!¡
hierarchy | authoritative
¡! Give me an Ipp,” he said, in a low, strong voice. He met the lead joey’s yellowed eyes and he knew that this alien would either finish him now or would own him for years to come until Reed eventually worked out how to turn tables and own the silver-stubbled bastard creature himself.

The joey spat a staticky rattle and a moment later a translator panel on the wall said, “!¡
aggressive | offended
¡! Explain, shit-comb.”

“!¡
calm | commanding
¡! Put me down and I’ll explain,” he said, and when the lead joey chattered and the two joeys suspending Reed by the wrists let him drop, he knew that he had started the process of owning the fuckers.

There was a rough part of the city, rougher than most of the rest. Most of its docks and riverside warehouses were derelict, most of the buildings were squats occupied by junkies and other deadbeats of any number of species. Just about its only redeeming feature was that you were never more than a block away from the river, which wrapped around the newly-formed Ipp in a great sweep which became known as the Loop.

Granted a new identity and protected by the joey gang that had nearly killed him, Frankhay became head of a newly-forged clan just as comfortable working with alien crimelords as with the other human clans of the city.

But still, back then, he made the effort, and it was at his first Council of the city elders that he met a young elder of the Virtue clan from Cragside Ipp, a striking, athletic woman with a shaved head and a confrontational attitude that was almost a match for his own. That was when he met Sol Virtue, and almost immediately he was besotted.

There was something Frankhay didn’t like about his fellow clan leaders from the outset. Something in their manner. He was quick to work out that it was the way they all liked things just the way they were. Each clan had its own preserve, each had its scams and trades and working arrangements, and none of them wanted that to change.

A new clan, a new Ipp, a clan-father with attitude and the balls to back it up... Frankhay scared them. And he
wanted
to scare them. He wanted to rattle their cozy routine. He had risen from nowhere, he had shown that the strong could forge a better existence for themselves and their followers.

The corollary of that was that the weak might not do so well.

“!¡
musing
¡! At least, I
thought
they were scared of me,” said Frankhay. “That was before I really understood how things were. Before I understood that they were scared
for
me.”

He went to that first Council prepared for hostility and on the look-out for opportunity. Sol was there in support of her clan-father, Levi, but it was clear that one day she would attend the gatherings in her own right. Frankhay saw something different in her. She didn’t seem scared of him. She even seemed happy to talk to him, curious about his new clan grown from the street gangs.

On the first night of the council, she and Frankhay slipped away from the stuffy spirit-drinking elders and found a corner in the human section of an ale-house on a side-street in Pennysway, the Ipp where the Council was being held. They drank beer and swapped stories late into the night.

Sol impressed Frankhay with her grasp of how the city worked, and how the clans fitted in; she had many valuable lessons to teach someone who had risen so quickly from such an unusual background.

Frankhay impressed Sol with his rough charm and his willingness to overturn any established rules or precedents if that was what best served the interests of his people. He explained that his clan’s dress code was a badge, a public statement that his clan were willing to be different. Until that night, he hadn’t really thought of it in those terms; he just dressed how he liked to dress.

That night they made a pact. While Frankhay would ally himself with no-one, he vowed that his clan would never turn against the Virtues. Sol, likewise, swore that her clan would never turn against the Hays.

“!¡
wry
¡! That lasted for years,” said Frankhay, “until you stole my pids and set the watchers on me. It was the Virtues who turned first.”

They sealed the pact by spending the night together in a room above that bar. “!¡
nostalgic | regretful
¡! I should have known,” said Frankhay. “How could I not have known I was fucking a machine, for the sake of the gods? Eh, lad? She went at it with some or other passion, I tell you. Never known anything like it, before or since. You don’t want to be hearin’ about how your old clan-mother screwed? Ha!”

“!¡
intrigued
¡! When did you find out?” I asked. “How?” Frankhay was still toying with the handgun. He dipped his head and now I saw the glint of a tear on his craggy cheek.

“!¡
factual reporting
¡! My second Council,” said Frankhay. “A quarter later. Deepest winter I’d known, with brown snow ploughed high by the main streets, side-streets and alleys blocked in with snow frozen solid, so as you entered buildings through upper floor windows. Blocks of ice in the river. When it thawed, there were bodies of frozen street kids poppin’ out all over. ’Minded me it wasn’t far since I’d’ve been one of them.”

After that first Council, Frankhay and Sol had kept up a distant relationship, meeting in the bars of Precept and Riverside. Neutral territory. Just friends, drinking and screwing at any opportunity.

Frankhay felt sick in his gut with the longing, the need. “!¡
deep anguish
¡! That’s the only time,” he said softly. “The only time I’ve ever let myself feel like that for snatch.”

Frankhay’s second Council meeting took place in Cragside. He felt more the part this time, more established. He didn’t care if the other elders shunned him or tried to put him in his place. He encouraged it. He never wanted to be like them. For a time he got lost in the facings-off and showmanship of it all, so that when Clan-father Levi Virtue was killed by a deranged flitterjack, he was caught completely off-guard.

They were gathered on a rooftop terrace with a view to the skystation to the north. Just chat. He couldn’t remember what it was about, just some minor elders jockeying for position.

The flitterjack flew in around a corner of crag with a whine and a buzz and an iridescent flickering of gauzy wings, and it took a glance and then a second take for Frankhay to spot the egg sac hanging heavy from the thing’s belly. He cried out an alarm, a warning. The flits were fine almost all the time, but when they were heavy with egg they were hypersensitive, picking up on signals that on their own world must mean something – a colour, a movement, a sound...