Diuturnity's Dawn (7 page)

Once more, the great green forest of the Mediterranea Plateau was rushing past outside the transport’s port. To the thranx, it was their deepest jungle, the most biologically mysterious region left on their homeworld. Visiting human researchers, strolling about comfortably in pants and shirts, were making valuable reports and passing on the results of their research to their thranx counterparts, who would have required special gear and attire simply to survive in the temperate-cool lower oxygen environment humans found perfectly amenable. Similar revelations were being made by thranx researchers stationed in the deep Amazon and Congo Basins on Earth. Of such serendipitous exchanges of data and knowledge were scientific alliances, if not diplomatic ones, strengthened.

During the high-speed commute they held hands and talked. Jeremy’s research was going exceptionally well, and everyone at the outpost was talking about Fanielle’s breakthrough in securing a meeting with a thranx who ranked high enough to actually make decisions as well as recommendations.

“I’m not going to be able to get near you when you get back,” he told her teasingly. “You’ll be blanketed by representatives of the media.”

“If this visit is a success,” she reminded him.

“There are no
ifs
where you’re concerned, lady-mine.”

“Maybe not where I’m concerned, but diplomacy is something else again.” Why, she wondered, did someone who was perfectly comfortable trolling the corridors of interstellar power suddenly and so frequently in this man’s presence devolve to the maturity level of a sixteen-year-old? She had long ago become convinced it was due to a recessive gene on the Y chromosome.

“Just like you’re something else again.” Leaning forward, he kissed her as passionately as the time remaining to the airport conveniently allowed, then rose. “I could use something to drink. Do you want anything before—?”

She became aware of the pain as vision returned. It seemed to increase in proportion to the intensity of the light that splashed across her retinas. Memory loaded in increasingly large chunks: who she was, where she ought to be, what she was supposed to be doing. Too much of it failed to jibe with what she was feeling and seeing. Though the first words she heard were in themselves entirely innocent, their import was uncompromisingly ominous.

“She’s awake.”

She recognized the voice. Ambassador Toroni had a distinctive, measured way of speaking, slightly nasal but memorable. It matched his face, which moments later was smiling down into her own. There was relief in his countenance, but no humor.

A voice she did not recognize said, “I’ll leave you alone with her for a while. Her vitals are fine, but she’s liable to be less than completely coherent until the comprehensive neural block has fully worn off. The aerogels will keep her comfortable. If anything untoward occurs, or something doesn’t look right, just hit the alert.”

“Thank you, nurse.”

Nurse.
Anjou liked the sound of that even less than the absence of humor in her superior’s expression. She struggled to sit up. Reading the relevant cerebral commands from the patch fastened to the back of her skull and ascertaining that rising did not contradict her medical profile, the bed complied.

Sitting up, she found that the light did not hurt as much. In addition to Toroni, Sertoa was also present. He did not even try to fake a smile. “Hello, Fanielle. How—how are you feeling?”

“Sleepy. Confused. Something hurts. No,” she corrected herself, “everything hurts, but something is muting it.” Looking past them, searching the hospital room, she did not see a third face. Especially not the one she sought. “I’ve been in an accident.”

Toroni nodded, very slowly. “What’s the last thing you remember, my dear?”

“Packing to go to Daret. No,” she corrected herself quickly, inspired perhaps by their stricken looks. “I was already on my way there. On the transport to the airport. With—” She looked past them again. “—Jeremy Hyguens.”

“He was a good friend of yours,” Sertoa commented softly.

“Yes. We are—” She broke off as Toroni threw the other man a look of quiet exasperation.

He was. That was what Sertoa had said.
He was.
She sank back into the cushioning aerogel, wishing it was solid enough to smother her. When she had finished crying, when the tears had subsided enough for her to form words again, she believed that she heard herself whispering, “What . . . happened?”

Bernard Toroni sat down on the edge of the bed, the transparent aerogel dimpling under his extra weight. He wanted to take this exceptional young woman’s hand, to hold it tightly, to make things better. But that was not a procedure allowed for in the diplomatic syllabus, and circumstances dictated that he keep a certain distance. He did not want to keep his distance, though. He wanted to hold her the way he had once held his own children back on Earth, before he had begun to receive assignments to other worlds.

“You were on a transport capsule in line for the airport. There was an empty cargo carrier on the strip ahead of you. No one knows exactly how it happened, but there was a program failure. The cargo unit’s drive field reversed. The two capsules hit very hard.”

“The kinetic energy released—” Sertoa started to say before a look from Toroni silenced him.

“Once engaged, transport capsule fields don’t ‘reverse.’ The programs are designed to be fail-safe. At worst, onboard in-line safeties should have cut its drive. Had that happened, your capsule’s onboard sensors would have had time to detect the failure ahead and bring it to a stop prior to impact.” He paused for reflection. “There were a total of twelve people on board the capsule you were traveling in. You and a fellow named Muu Nulofa from Engineering were the only survivors.”

“Jeremy—” She did not swallow particularly hard, but her throat was on fire.

Toroni shifted his position on the edge of the bed. No one else had been willing to pay this first visit. “The lifesavers who extricated you from what was left of the capsule found his body sprawled across yours. They theorize that the extra . . . padding . . . is what saved your chest from being crushed when the front wall of your cubicle caved in. There was nothing they could do for him. Cerebral and internal hemorrhaging.” He hesitated. “I did not know the man, but I have since spoken to some of his colleagues. They all describe him as a fine human being who was dedicated to his work. And to . . . other things.”

Her eyes rose to meet his. He did not enjoy the experience, but he respected the woman in the bed far too much to look away. “Did they also tell you we had been discussing marriage?”

“No.” The ambassador’s lips tightened. “No, nobody mentioned that to me.”

She relieved him by turning her head to one side, letting the warm aerogel supply the support her muscles no longer cared to provide. “We didn’t talk about it much except among ourselves. There were too many other distractions. Professional—” She choked softly on the word.

It was quiet in the room. No one spoke for many minutes: the two men remaining silent out of respect, the woman because she no longer had anything to say. Behind her eyes, something had gone away.

“It’s very interesting,” Toroni finally murmured. When she failed to react, he added, “Unprecedented, certainly.”

Moving with a slowness that had as its source something deeper and more profound than medication, she rolled her head back in his direction. “What is?”

“The expression of concern. On a personal level. From our hosts.”

She frowned ever so slightly. “I don’t understand.”

“Some of the recently communicated terminology is unique to our translator’s experience. I am told there are nuances involved they have never before seen expressed.” He mustered a fatherly smile. “There are several from your contact Haflunormet, as well as from other contacts you have made among the locals. Of particular note is the one from Eint Carwenduved. Not only are deepest regrets expressed, but she wishes to assure us that as soon as you are able to resume work, she looks forward now more than ever to making your acquaintance.”

“Your meeting is still on.” Sertoa looked pleased. “You’ll carry into it with you the extra benefit of added sympathy.”

Her mind stirred, roiled, thoughts and emotions crashing into one another before slipping away in opposing directions. “No I won’t,” she responded tersely.

Toroni blinked. “I’m sorry, my dear?”

The look in her eyes was very different from the one that had commanded her countenance only moments earlier. “I won’t be carrying sympathy or anything else into that meeting because I’m not going to be in attendance. I’m not going, Bernard. I’m finished here. Finished with Hivehom, finished with the bu—with the thranx, finished with everything.” She turned away, until all she could see was the aerogel support. The portion in front of her face opaqued when she closed her eyes. “I want—I need to go home.”

The ambassador considered. In the course of his distinguished career he had been faced with similar situations before. Some had even been inflected with highly emotional overtones. But never before anything like this. Never. That did not keep him from pressing forward as he knew he must.

“Fanielle,” he told her as tenderly as he could, “you
have
to do this. No one else here at the mission has managed to achieve as intimate a rapport with our hosts. No one else is as facilely comfortable with their ways, with their habits or mannerisms.
You are the best qualified to take this meeting.
That’s why you were given the assignment of trying to secure it in the first place. It’s your moment of triumph. You have to take it.”

From the vicinity of the aerogel came the agonizingly stillborn response. “I don’t want it anymore.”

Hating himself, Toroni refused to let it, or her, go. Both were too important. “It’s not a question of you wanting or not wanting it. You have to do it because no one else can do it as well. This is a highly sensitive moment in the development of relations between our species and the thranx. Perhaps even a milestone. We won’t know until we see the fruits of our labors begin to blossom. The fruits of your labors, Fanielle. Do you really want to cast aside everything you’ve worked for here?”

“I’ve already cast it, Bernard. Find somebody else to go. Find somebody else to take my place.”

Swallowing determinedly, he leaned toward her, careful not to initiate a significant disturbance within the highly responsive aerogel. “Don’t you think, Fanielle, that if I felt someone, anyone else, was sufficiently qualified I would have assigned them to the task already? Before coming here to see you?”

Deep within, a certain component of her shattered self was pleased by the sincere words of a man she greatly respected. But like so much else that was Fanielle Anjou, that part of her was hiding now, isolated and shunted aside by the nightmare that had overwhelmed her life.

“I told you, Bernard. I don’t care. It’s not important anymore.”

He nodded slowly, even though she was not looking at him. Or at anything else. The ensuing silence lasted longer than its predecessor. Once again, it was the ambassador who broke it.

“Program failure. Transport capsule drive fields just don’t go into reverse. The system is replete with fail-safes—every one of which failed. The engineers are working on it, working hard. They’re good people, but they’re baffled. They cannot afford to be, because we must know what caused the accident. If we don’t know, then we cannot with any certainty prevent a repetition. Of the accident. If,” he concluded concisely, “it was an accident.”

It was enough to turn her head. “Bernard?”

Sertoa took his turn. “Fanielle, you know as well as any of us that there are elements, some of them with substantial backing, both among the thranx and our own kind who will do anything to prevent the kind of union between our species that the enlightened among us seek. I’m not talking about the great mass of undecideds on both sides. I’m talking about the kind of blatant, old-fashioned fanaticism we thought we had evolved beyond.”

Slowly, she digested what her colleague was saying. Contemplated it from an assortment of viewpoints. In the end, every one of them was equally ugly.

“You think someone deliberately reprogrammed that cargo capsule to reverse and smash into the one that was taking me to the airport?”

“We don’t know that.” Toroni was relieved to see some small flicker of alertness return to his junior colleague’s expression, even if it was thus far focused entirely on concern for something unconnected to professional interests. “At this point it is only speculation. But I am not the only one to have considered it. Azerick Authority is pondering the possibility with utmost seriousness. If, and I caution if, the hypothesis should turn out to have any basis in fact, it would mean that our entire modus here will have to undergo the most strict review. We will continue to press forward with our work, of course. More fiercely than ever. But we will have to do many things differently.”

She heard everything he said, but in manner muted. Her own thoughts were churning. “Somebody would kill a dozen innocent people just to get to me, to keep me from a stupid meeting?”

“Not stupid.” The strength of her response allowed the ambassador to employ a stronger tone of his own. “Highly important. Possible milestone.”

“And maybe it wasn’t someone,” Sertoa added. “Maybe it was some thing.” He eyed her sternly. “The thranx have their own fanatics, remember.”

“But to resort to killing a diplomat . . .” Her voice trailed away into disbelief.

“Why not?” Turning, Sertoa began pacing slowly, waving his hands to emphasize his words. “If successful, they set back our efforts until we can find someone else capable of achieving your kind of personal rapport with their kind. If discovered, word reaches Earth that thranx have carried out a mass killing of humans here on Hivehom. Either way, they achieve at least one of their ends.”

“Which is why,” Toroni went on, “no word of our suspicions is being allowed to go beyond Azerick. Officially, there was a programming failure. A transport accident. Nothing more. Unofficially, desperate unease is being bounced between worlds at high speed and without regard to the cost.”