Forging Zero (43 page)

“How
can it be, when so many use it?”
Yuil demanded.  The
haauk soared skyward, leaving the ground behind with such rapidity that the
crushed black gravel seemed to fall out from under them.  Joe gasped and his
fists spasmed reflexively around the railing.

The
young Ooreiki seemed to enjoy Joe’s reaction. 
“I worked for six turns to
save up the regard for this
haauk.
  It’s of special Ueshi design.  Maybe
someday I’ll show you the things I can do with it.”
  He veered teasingly.

“That’s
okay,” Joe said, feeling ill.  “I believe you.”

Yuil
slowed near the edge of the city, proceeding towards a jagged roof that looked
unfinished.  The Ooreiki maneuvered the haauk up and under a lip of rock and a
wide cave appeared before them, invisible from the outside.

Yuil
set the haauk down and brought the akarit out from under the dash of the
control panel.  Then he stepped off the craft and began to walk back toward the
entrance of the cave, motioning for Joe to follow him.

The
view was frightening.  This close to the edge of the city, the
ferlii
trees
seemed too large to be real.  From his vantage, Joe could see the red masses of
spores atop the branches and immediately his lungs began to itch.  He hacked up
a red glob of mucus and glanced at the Ooreiki.

Yuil
was watching him.  He turned away quickly, pretending he hadn’t been, but Joe
had seen.  He had the uneasy thought that maybe Libby was right, that he was
simply bringing Joe here for a rendezvous with a slave trader.

“I
found this place when I was in
yeeri
academy,”
Yuil said. 
“Back when Alishai voted to commission a seventh ring.  They
abandoned it because
draak
could reach it from the ferlii branches. 
They’ll finish it the next time they add a ring to the city.”

“You go
to school?”  Joe felt a surge of hope, of kinship.

“I
went.  I failed.  My art was not good enough.”
 
Yuil made a disappointed sound.

“Your…art?”

Yuil held
up his silver-encased fingers.  The Celtic knots winding their way around the
four tentacles on his right hand reminded Joe of Kihgl’s kasja that Nebil had
taken from him. 
“I am of the yeeri caste.  We are expected to either excel
in art or devote ourselves to tending our ancestors’ oorei.  I will probably be
shipping off to Poen soon, unless I can hire myself out to a foreigner.  Even
poorly-trained
yeeri
are in high demand in the newer planets.  I might
even be able to find work on Earth. 

“We
have artists on Earth,” Joe said.  “Good ones, too.”

Yuil
scoffed.
  “Nothing in the universe can compare to a master yeeri.  People
will impoverish themselves simply to pay for the right to watch her work.”

“Wait,”
Joe said, frowning at the Ooreiki.  “You’re a
girl?”

“I
could be if I wanted to.  The
yeeri
is the only
caste allowed to reproduce.  It helps keep the lines clear of Fire Gods.”

Joe
stared at the Ooreiki, trying to understand if she was telling him she
was
a girl or could get a sex change if she felt like it.  Then something very
pressing occurred to him.  “Are my commanders all girls, too?”

Yuil
looked as if he’d insulted her.  “Yeeri
aren’t drafted.  It was written into
the Ooreiki Pact.  Your superiors are probably
hoga
or
wriit,
but
one or two might be Fire Gods.”

“You
worship gods of fire?”  Joe had not envisioned the Ooreiki, with all of their
superior technology, to be pagans.

“No. 
Fire Gods. 
Vkala.
  They’re the descendants of
the diplomats who signed the pact that made the Ooreiki one of the eight
founding members of Congress.  The Ayhi gave them the Jreet’s ability to resist
fire so they could visit Vora and sign the Pact.  They would not go otherwise.”
 
Yuil gave him a funny look. 
“Do you know
nothing
, Choe?”

Joe
ignored the jab.  “Because Ooreiki hate fire,” Joe said, thinking of what Kihgl
had said.

“Kkee. 
Fire.  It is the greatest danger to an oorei, aside from maybe the Dhasha.”
 Her face twisted at the last. 
“The gods are unjust, letting
Knaaren survive after what he did.  I hope the ghost sickness claims him
swiftly, for your sake, Choe.”

“What’s
a Fire God look like?” Joe asked, still thinking of the Ooreiki castes.  He was
pretty sure he could already guess.

Yuil
pulled a wisp of gauzy fabric away from her chest, bearing a small, puckered
mark on her stomach. 
“They bear no
Shenaal
because their skin does
not burn during the Niish Ahymar.  The priests put them in cages or pits with
immature onen.  Most get ripped to pieces, but the ones who survive are given
to the Army, marked by thousands of scars crisscrossing their bodies so every
Ooreiki remembers what their ancestors did.”

That
meant Kihgl and Lagrah were both Fire Gods. 

“
Vkala
are the lowest caste,”
Yuil continued. 
“They are
still paying for their ancestors’ sins.”

“Back when
they signed the Ooreiki up for the Congress,” Joe said.

“Kkee,”
Yuil said, nodding.

Joe
cleared his throat.  “Wasn’t Congress formed two million years ago?  When will
they be forgiven?”

Yuil’s
face instantly darkened. 
“When Congress no longer exists.”

“So you
guys hate Congress as much as we do.”

“Kkee. 
Everyone hates Congress.”

“So why
don’t you disband it?” Joe asked.

Yuil
laughed. 
“Do you realize how difficult it is to kill a Dhasha?  Their only
vulnerability is a tiny nerve center at the back of their head, under their
horns.  The only way you can hurt them there is if you hit them with a direct
blast of energy fire.  Then you’ve only got a few moments to get to it and tear
out the nerve center, or cut away enough scales to give it a direct blast to
its core.  Either that or Jreet poison, but Jreet die before giving up their
poison sacs and even if you had it, you’d have to get it past the scales to
make it work.”

“You
sound like you know a lot about being a soldier,” Joe said.

Yuil
glanced wistfully out at the city. 
“I used to wish I was a
hoga
or
wriit
so I could help the Army bring the Dhasha under control.  I’m more mature now,
but I still want to be there when the Fourfold Prophecy is fulfilled.”

Joe’s
ears pricked up.  “My commander mentioned that to me.”

The
young Ooreiki glanced back at him, looking excited. 
“He did?  He must have
favored you greatly.  What’d he say?”

“Nothing
much,” Joe said, sighing.  “He confused me more than anything.”

Yuil
looked disappointed. 
“They say the Trith made it, that they’ve seen
Congress’s doom from the moment it was conceived.”

“And it
means Congress is going to fall apart?” Joe asked, remembering Representative
Na’leen’s comment.

Yuil
made a noncommittal sound. 
“No one really knows.  My guess, Choe, is someday
it’s going to meet a planet it can’t conquer, and that planet will have a
species that is going to rip it apart.  They’ll create a new peace, one not
even the Dhasha can break.”

Joe
contemplated that in silence as he stared out over the alien city.  “I don’t
believe in prophecies.”

“You
should,”
Yuil laughed. 
“You’re living in the
time of the foretelling, Choe.  Everyone’s saying it’s gonna be sometime in the
next hundred years.  Some say it’s gonna be the Dhasha Vahlin, but personally,
I think it’ll be a Huouyt to end Congress.  They can become any species in the
universe, so why not one of them?”

“I
heard about that,” Joe said warily.  “They can change shape.”

“Yes,”
Yuil said. 
“But more than that.  It happens at a genetic
level.  All that remains of them afterwards is their zora.”

“Huh?”

Yuil
made a dismissive gesture. 
“You’ve probably never even see a Huouyt.”

“I’ve
seen one,” Joe said, remembering Zol’jib and Representative Na’leen.

Yuil
looked a little surprised…maybe even impressed. 
“This is an Ooreiki
planet.  They’re very rare, here.  Still, you wouldn’t see the zora.  They keep
that inside their heads.”

“The
wormy thing,” Joe said.  “Is that what they use to eat?”

“Actually,
yes,”
Yuil said, giving him an odd look, now. 
“They
use it to collect and assimilate genetic material.  It’s why they will rule
Congress someday.  They can be
anything
, Choe.”

Joe
bristled at that.  “A Huouyt told me there were plenty of creatures they can’t
reproduce,” Joe said.  “So why not one of
them
?”

Yuil’s
sudah fluttered. 
“It is true.  Certain creatures…resist…the pattern.  Turn
the Huouyt into mush for trying to imitate their genetics.  But the Jreet and
the Dhasha have had hundreds of thousands of years to throw off Congressional
yoke, and here they remain.”

“What
about the Trith?” Joe asked, thinking of the fabled creatures everyone seemed
to talk about like the boogey-man.  “Could they take over?”

“The
Trith are as indifferent to us as a mountain is to a grain of sand.”
  Yuil had an almost…awed…tone when she spoke.

“Why?”
Joe asked, frowning.

Yuil
looked at him like he was stupid. 
“If you ever see one, you’ll understand.”

“You’ve
seen one?” Joe asked, curious.

The
young Ooreiki glanced around them, then put her silver-capped fingers on Joe’s
shoulder and pulled him back inside the cave.  She took him to the far corner
and pulled him down into a sitting position, with the Ooreiki seeming to pool
on the floor from the waist down. 

Yuil
glanced both ways and pulled her translator from her neck and set it on Joe’s
knee so she could lean in close. 
“From a distance,”
she whispered.
 
“It
was walking across the commuter terminal orbiting Neskfaat.”

“Congress
lets them walk around?” Joe demanded.  “I thought they were traitors.  Why
don’t they just kill all of them?”

“You
can’t kill a Trith,”
Yuil said, suddenly sounding
irritated. 
“They see every loophole, every mechanical malfunction, every
lapse in security millions of years before it happens.”

“But if
Congress—”

Yuil
held up her silver-capped fingers, stopping him. 
“We can speak more of
Trith next time we meet.  Tell me of yourself.”

Joe
realized he had offended Yuil somehow and he began to worry that his
conversation would be cut short.  He looked at his knees a moment, then said,
“I could tell you about where I come from,” Joe said.

“Earth.” 
The way Yuil said it, it sounded like, “Year-thuh.”

“I
lived in San Diego during the Draft,” Joe said.  “My dad stayed there after he
got out of the Marines in Camp Pendleton.  That’s like the Army, but better. 
They’re really bad-ass.  I was thinking about joining up after I got out of
high school.”

Yuil
sounded almost dreamy when she said,
“So you were
destined
to be a
soldier.”

It was
Joe’s turn to be irritated.  “I’m not a soldier.  I’m a prisoner.”

“Ah.”
  An uncomfortable silence stretched between them.  Then,
“It
must have been nice to believe you were the only creatures in the universe.”

“Nobody
really thought that,” Joe said.  “Not many of us, anyway.  We just didn’t think
aliens would find
us,
you know?  We always thought
we’d
find
you.
”

Yuil
snorted through her sudah. 
“With your technology?  It would have been eons
before you left your solar system.”

“Hey,
we’d been to the Moon,” Joe said.  Then he felt stupid, because the aliens had
been traveling through space for three million years, if not more, and moons
were no big deal.

“It
doesn’t matter,”
Yuil said. 
“As soon as you
become a citizen, Congress will give you the technology you need to travel to
other galaxies.  You Humans will learn more in the next hundred turns than you
learned since you started building fires in caves.”

“At
least we’re not scared of fire,” Joe retorted, feeling inexplicably defensive
of his home.  He
hated
the way everyone treated them like they were
weaklings or morons or bacterial colonies under a high-powered microscope. 

Instead
of being angry, Yuil looked excited. 
“You’ve seen it?”