Engineering Infinity (38 page)

He met the An-he in a windowless,
antique chamber hung with tapestries (at least,
tapestries
seemed like the right word). Sleekly upholstered couches were scattered over
the floor. The guard who’d escorted him backed out, snorting. Patrice looked
around, vaguely bothered by an overly-warm indoor breeze. He saw someone almost
human, loose-limbed and handsome in Speranza tailoring, reclining on a couch -
large, wide-spaced eyes alight with curiosity - and realised he was alone with
the king.

“Excuse my steward,” said the An.
“He doesn’t speak English well, and doesn’t like to embarrass himself by
trying. Please, be at home.”

“Thank you for seeing me,” said
Patrice. “Your, er, Majesty - ?”

The An-he grinned. “You are
Patrice. I am the An, let’s just talk.”

The young co-ruler was charming
and direct. He asked about the police: Patrice noted, disappointed, that
Ki-anna
was a title,
the Ki-she
,
or something. He wondered what you had to do to learn
their personal names.

“It was a brief interview,” he
admitted, ruefully. “I got the impression they weren’t very interested.”

“Well, I
am
interested. Lione was a great friend to my people. To
both
my peoples. I’m not sure I understand, were you partners, or litter-mates?”

“We were twins, that means
litter-mates, but ‘partners’ too, though our careers took different directions.”

He needed to get
partner
into the conversation. The An partnership wasn’t
sexual, but it was lifelong, and the closest social and emotional bond they
knew. A lost partner
justified his appeal.

The An-he touched the clip on the
side of his head (he was using a transaid, too), reflexively. “A double loss,
poor Patrice. Please do confide in me, it will help enormously if you are
completely frank -”

In this pairing, the An-she was
the senior. She made the decisions, but Patrice couldn’t meet her, she was too
important. He could only work on the An-he, who would (hopefully) promote his
cause... He had the eerie thought that he was doing exactly what Lione had done
- trying to make a good impression on this alien aristocrat, maybe in this very
room. The tapestries (if that was the word) swam and rippled in the moving air,
drawing his attention to scenes he really didn’t want to examine. Brightly
dressed lords and ladies gathered for the hunt. The game was driven onto the
guns. The butchery, the bustling kitchen scenes, the
banquet
-

He realised, horrified, that his
host had asked him something about his work on Mars, and he hadn’t heard the
question.

“Oh,” said the An-he, easily. “I
see what you’re looking at. Don’t be offended, it’s all in the past, and
priceless, marvellous art. Recreated, sadly. The originals were destroyed,
along with the original of this castle. But still, our heritage! Don’t you
Blues love ancient battle scenes, heaps of painted slaughter? And by the way,
aren’t you closely related, limb for limb and bone for bone, to the beings that
you
traditionally kill and eat?”

“Not on Mars.”

“There, you are sundered from
your web of life. At home on Earth, the natural humans do it all the time, I
assure you.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

Notoriously, the Ki and the An
had
both
been affronted when they were identified,
by other sentient bipeds, as a single species. Of course they knew, but an
indecent topic! In ways, the most disturbing aspect of “the KiAn issue” was not
the genocidal war, in which the oppressed had risen up, savagely, against the
oppressors. It was the fact that some highly respected Ki leaders actually
defended
“the traditional diet of the An.”

The An-he showed his bright white
teeth. “Then you have an open mind, my dear Patrice! It gives me hope that you’ll
come to understand us.” He stretched, and exhaled noisily. “Enough. All I can
tell you today is that your request is under consideration. You’re a valuable
person, and it’s dangerous down there! We don’t want to lose you. Now, I
suppose you’d like to see your sister’s rooms? She stayed with us, you know:
here in the castle.”

“Would that be possible?”

“Certainly! I’ll get some people
to take you.”

More guards - or servants in
military-looking uniform - led him along winding, irregular corridors, all
plagued by that insistent breeze, and opened a round plug of a doorway. The
An-he’s face appeared, on a display screen emblazoned on a guard’s tunic.

“Take as long as you like, dear
Patrice. Don’t be afraid of disturbing the evidence! The police took anything
they thought was useful, ages ago.”

The guards gave him privacy,
which he had not expected: they shut the door and stayed outside. He was alone,
in his sister’s space. The aeons he’d crossed, the unthinkable interstellar
distance, vanished. Lione was
here
. He could feel
her, all around him. The warm air, suddenly still, seemed full of images:
glimpses of his sister, rushing into his mind -

“Recreation” was skin-deep here.
Essentially the room was identical to his cabin. A bed-shelf with a puffy
mattress; storage space beneath. A desk, a closet bathroom, stripped of fittings.
Her effects had been returned to Mars, couriered as data. The police had been
and gone “ages ago.” What could this empty box tell him? Nothing, but he had to
try.

Was he under surveillance? He
decided he didn’t care.

He searched swiftly, efficiently,
studying the floor, running his hands over the walls and closet space, checking
the seals on the mattress. The screen above the desk was set in an ornate
decorative frame. He probed around it, and his fingertips brushed something
that had slipped behind. Carefully, patiently, he teased out a corner of the
object, and drew it from hiding.

Lione
,
he whispered.

He tucked his prize inside the
breast of his shipboard jumper, and went to knock on the round door. It opened,
and the guards were there.

“I’m ready to leave now.”

The An-he looked out of the tunic
display again. “By all means! But don’t be a stranger. Come and see me again,
come often!”

That evening he searched the
little tablet’s drive for his own name, for a message. He tried every password
of theirs he could remember: found nothing, and was heartbroken. He barely
noted the contents, except that it wasn’t about her work. Next day, to his
great surprise, he was recalled to the castle. He met the An-he as before, and
learned that the Ruling An would like to approve his mission, but the police
were making difficulties.

“Speranza doesn’t mind having a
tragedy associated with their showcase Project,” said the young king. “A
scandal would be much worse, so they want to bury this. My partner and I feel
you have a right to investigate, but we have met with resistance.”

There was nothing Patrice could
do... and it wasn’t a refusal. If the alien royals were on his side, the police
would probably be helpless in the end. Back in his cabin he examined the tablet
again and realised that Lione had been keeping a private record of her
encounter with “the KiAn issue.”

KiAn isn’t
like other worlds of the Diaspora; they didn’t have a Conventional Space Age
before First Contact. But they weren’t primitives when “we” found them, nor
even Mediaeval. The An of today are the remnant of a planetary superpower. They
were always the Great Nation, and the many nations of the Ki were treated as
inferior, through millennia of civilisation. But it was no more than fifteen
hundred standard years ago, when, in a time of famine, the An or “Heaven Born”
first began to hunt and eat the “Earth Born” Ki. They don’t do that anymore.
They have painless processing plants (or did). They have retail packaging -

Cannibalism
happens. It’s known in every sentient and pre-sentient biped species. What
developed on KiAn is different, and the so-called “atavists” are not really
atavist. This isn’t the survival, as some on Speranza would like to believe, of
an ancient prehistoric symbiosis. The An
weren’t
animals,
when this “stable genocide” began. They were people, who could think and feel.
People, like us.

The entry was text-only, but he
heard his sister’s voice: forthright, uncompromising. She must have forced
herself to be more tactful with the An-he! The next was video. Lione, talking
to him. Living and breathing.

Inside the slim case, when he
opened it, he’d found pressed fragments of a moss, or lichen. Shards of it
clung to his fingers; it smelled odd, but not unpleasant. He sniffed his
fingertips and turned pages, painfully happy.

Days passed, in a rhythm of light
and darkness that belonged to the planet “below.” Patrice shuttled between the “station
visitors’ quarters,” where he was the only guest, and the An castle. He didn’t
dare refuse a summons, although he politely declined all dinner invitations,
which made the An laugh.

The odd couple showed no interest
in Patrice at all, and did not return his calls. He might have tried harder to
get their attention, but there was Lione’s journal. He didn’t want to hand it
over; or to lie about it either.

Once, as they walked in the
castle’s galleries, the insistent breeze nagging at him as usual, Patrice felt
he was being watched. He looked up. From a high, curtained balcony a wide-eyed,
narrow face was looking down intently. “
That
was the
An-she,” murmured his companion, stooping to exhale the words in Patrice’s ear.
“She likes you, or she wouldn’t have let you glimpse her... I tell her all
about you.”

“I didn’t really see anything,”
said Patrice, wary of causing offence. “The breeze is so strong, tossing the
curtains about.”

“I’m afraid we’re obsessed with
air circulation, due to the crowded accommodation. There are aliens about, who
don’t always smell very nice.”

“I’m very sorry! I had no idea!”

“Oh no, Patrice, not you. You
smell fresh and sweet.”

The entries in Lione’s journal
weren’t dated, but they charted a progress. At first he was afraid he’d find
Lione actually defending industrial cannibalism. That never happened. But as he
immersed himself, reviewing every entry over and over, he knew Lione was asking
him to understand. Not to accept, but to
understand
the unthinkable -

Compare
chattel slavery.
We look on the buying and selling
of sentient bipeds, as if they were livestock, with revulsion. Who could
question that?
Then think of the intense bond
between a beloved master, or mistress, and a beloved servant. A revered
commanding officer and devoted troops. Must this go too? The An and the Ki
accept that their way of life
must
change. But there
is a deep equality in that exchange of being, which we “democratic
individualists” can’t recognise -

Patrice thought of the Ki-Anna’s
scars.

The “deep equality” entry was
almost the last.

The journal ended abruptly, with
no sense of closure.

Lione’s incense - he’d decided
the “lichen” was a kind of KiAn incense, perhaps a present from the An-he -
filled his cabin with a subtle perfume. He closed the tablet, murmuring the
words he knew by heart,
a deep equality in that exchange of
being
, and decided to turn in. In his tiny bathroom, for a piercing
moment it was Lione he saw in the mirror. A dark-skinned, light-eyed, serious
young woman, with the aquiline bones of their North African ancestry. His other
self, who had left him so far behind -

The whole journal was a message.
It called him to follow her, and he didn’t yet know where his passionate journey
would end.

When he learned that permission
to visit the surface was granted, but the Ki-anna and the Interplanetary
Affairs officer were coming too, he knew that the Ruling An had been forced to make
this concession - and the bargaining was over. He just wished he knew
why
the police had insisted on escorting him. To help
Patrice discover the truth? Or to prevent him?

He didn’t meet the odd couple
until they embarked together. They were all in full protective gear: skin
sealed with quarantine film, under soft-shell life-support suits. The noisy
shuttle bay put a damper on conversation, and the flight was no more sociable.
Patrice spent it encased in an escape capsule and breathing tanked air: the police
insisted on this. He saw nothing of KiAn until he was crunching across the
seared rubble of their landing field.

The landscape was dry tundra,
like Martian desert colour-shifted into shades of grey and green. Armed Green
Belts were waiting, with a landship and all-terrain hardsuits for the visitors.

“The An-he offered me a military
escort,” said Patrice, freedom of speech restored by helmet radio. “What was
wrong with that?”

“Sorry,” grunted Bhvaaan. “Couldn’t
be allowed.”

The Ki-anna said nothing. He
remembered, vividly, the way he’d felt at their meeting. There had been a
connection, on her side too: he knew it. Now she was just another bulky
Speranza doll, on a smaller scale than her partner. As if she’d read his
thoughts, she cleared her faceplate and looked out at him, curiously. He wanted
to tell her that he understood KiAn, better than she could imagine... but not
with Bhvaaan around.

“You’ve been keeping yourself to
yourself, Messer Ferringhi.”

“I could say the same of you two,
Officer Bhvaaan.”

“Aap. But you made friends with
the An-he.”

“The Ruling An were very willing
to help me.”

“We’ve been working in your
interest too,” said the Ki-anna. She pivoted her suit to look through the
windowband in the landship’s flank. “Far below this plateau, back that way, was
the regional capital.
Were
fertile plains, rich
forests, towns and fields and parklands. The ‘roof of Heaven’ was never
beautiful. It’s strange, this part hardly seems much changed -”