Regeneration (Czerneda) (18 page)

“Mac. You know we can’t go in there.”

She frowned, but not at her troubled companion.

“Mac.”

She thrust her bag at him. “Here.”

“Dr. Connor. The lev’s waiting.” More resigned comment than complaint. Sing-li had learned to read her by now.

“This won’t take long,” Mac promised absently, putting her hand on the door itself and giving a tiny push.

For some reason, she wasn’t surprised when the large door swung noiselessly out of her path. She stepped inside and closed the door behind her, muffling Sing-li’s unhappy protest.

Her eyes needed a few seconds to adjust from the brilliance of the corridor to this shadowed place. Impatient, Mac lifted her hands as she walked forward in case they’d rearranged the walls, something the consulate was prone to do. She’d rather not arrive at Base with a red nose or black eye to explain.

This had been the tank room, a simple name for an extraordinary feat of engineering. Here, in this cavernous space, the Sinzi had built the first known permanent and accessible enclosure of no-space, a dimension beyond, behind, above, or after—whatever confusion you liked—normal reality. For no-space allowed certain liberties with time and distance, including winking a ship and its contents between connected star systems.

With Sinzi practicality, they’d used this marvel to house a block of shrimp-rich ocean, so their favorite delicacy could be instantly accessed from any room with a connected table tank. With Sinzi forethought, this not coincidentally provided an immediate demonstration of this breakthrough’s potential for selected consulate guests.

The shrimp? Although tasty, they hadn’t fared as well—direct exposure to no-space still meant what went in alive, came back dead. Albeit fresh.

The Sinzi were working on that.

No-space was at the core of everything Ro, who had no difficulties surviving it, or bringing along friends. The Ro hadn’t, until encountering the Sinzi’s little demonstration, found a way to directly observe areas of real space from inside their realm.

Small wonder the Ro had been drawn to the Sinzi’s toy.

Mac’s nose twitched. They’d cleaned up the flood of water and its dying life, released when she’d fought to save herself from the Ro. Destroying the main tank had been an inevitable side effect, but no one blamed her. To everyone’s relief, the table tanks had been replaced overnight with burnished slabs of local stone, presumably spy-proof.

She hadn’t been here since.

Her eyes caught a glimpse of light and Mac moved in that direction, hands still up.

They met something cool and slick and hard.

“Gods, no,” she breathed as she stopped. Mac stared ahead until her eyes burned, gradually making out details.

She might have been looking through a porthole into abyssal depths. The lights she could see were indicators on shapeless panels, pulsating greens and blues and yellows. They were stacked in a pyramid arrangement, the other sides and top beyond her view. The dim flickers reflected from the waving arms of anemones, the lacy fronds of sea fan and tube worm, flashed from the back of a small white crab. They were residents of a rising mound of pale bone, stacked before the pyramid like an offering.

Whalebone,
Mac identified, sagging with relief.

Some of the glow marked the edges of swaying spirals of kelp. The immense plants grew up into the darkness. Between, darker shadows teased, sending back glints of moving green or blue or yellow, as if the artificial lights caught knife blades slipping through the forest.

Mac pulled back, only now aware of the throb beneath her feet, and braced herself.

The Sinzi-ra had rebuilt her tank.

“I’m here,” she announced, proud of her clear, firm voice. “Mackenzie Winifred Elizabeth Wright Connor Sol.” She wasn’t talking to the trapped things. She was talking to what she couldn’t see.
Yet.

Silence. A curious octopus tiptoed toward her, its huge eyes unblinking. After a long moment of mutual scrutiny, the mollusk made its decision about the Human and suddenly jetted backward into the dark.

“You talked to me before. Here I am.”
Talk?
Mac’s hands became fists. She remembered all too well how the Ro’s version of speech had seemed to rip through her skin and burn itself into the flesh beneath. “In case you’re confused on the topic, I’m not dead.” She replayed that last bit mentally.
Another gem of interspecies communication.

The darkness developed chill fingers, pressing against her face, working their way down her throat. Mac wrapped her arms around her middle and cursed her imagination. “What do you want from us? Answer me!” she ordered, careful not to shout, but her voice echoed.

An echo complete with the tinkle of small silver rings.

Mac turned as far as she dared, unwilling to put her back to the tank and what might—she dreaded as much as hoped—might be hiding inside. “Anchen?”

A ball of translucent red ignited between them; Mac assumed it was some kind of portable light. It cast a warm pink glow over the Sinzi-ra’s white gown and skin. The great topaz eyes remained in shadow. “Hello, Mac,” Anchen greeted her.

“What are you doing here?”

“Waiting for you. I’d be a poor host indeed if I did not wish you well on your journey.”

Mac swallowed, keeping a wary eye on the dark tank. “How did you know?” The consulate was clear of the vidbots annoyingly prominent in Human public places. Mac had grown rather fond of believing she could skulk at will.
Had that changed?

The light was enough to see Anchen’s half bow. “We are alike, Mac, in several respects. I felt confident you would revisit those places of meaning to you before you left, as would I. I confess, I hadn’t expected to find you conversing with the past.” A thoughtful pause. “Or do you truly believe the Myrokynay have slipped past our watch and returned? And, if so, that they will reveal themselves to you if you shout at them?”

Put that way . . .
Mac winced and stopped there. “I thought it worth a try,” she shrugged. “Everyone else thinks I matter to the Ro. And you did rebuild the tank,” this last a half question.
Why?

The Sinzi-ra moved to stand beside her, taller and more fragile, yet with an otherworldly grace even the shadows couldn’t disguise. One fingertip, with its stiff useful nail, tapped the dark glass. “Like you, I thought it worth a try,” answered the alien.

The
lamnas
slid along Anchen’s long finger, sending glints of rose from the light she carried. Mac wondered what each might reveal.
If a Human brain could make any sense of it,
she added honestly, considering she wasn’t sure how much sense she’d made of Nik’s and they’d started with similar wetware.

Then she shook her head, more concerned with something else, something far more important. “Anchen. Don’t make it easy for them. Don’t invite the Ro back here.”

“We cannot begin to understand one another if we do not converse, Mac.”

“I’m all for conversation. Just let it be somewhere and someone else.” Mac didn’t bother being dismayed by her own bluntness. The Sinzi-ra was used to her by now. “I mean no insult, Anchen,” she continued in a low voice. “I—”
Only the truth.
She took a deep breath and flattened her hand over the place on the tank where Anchen had tapped, feeling the cold. “I’m afraid. For you. For all Sinzi.”
The whole truth.
“For us, if anything happens to you. You must be more cautious.”

“I need not remind you, Mac, that all life is currently at risk from the Dhryn. It is inappropriate to fear for one species—or individual—over another.”

“The rest of us don’t stand in the Ro’s way, Anchen. Your species maintains the Interspecies Union. Without you, the transects fail and we’re each alone.”

“If,” the alien stressed the word, “the Ro are a threat.”

“You can’t take that chance!” Mac insisted, turning to face Anchen. The red glow danced back, as if courteously avoiding her face. She couldn’t tell if it was somehow tethered to the Sinzi or floating free like a vidbot. In either case, its light enclosed them both in a bubble that might almost have been privacy, if not for the ominous tank and its instruments.
An audience to this was fine by her.
“You don’t dare, for all our sakes. Please, Anchen. Tell me you’ll be careful.”

“Following your example?”

Mac snorted. “I’m not important.”

Cool fingertips coated in dancing silver reached to her face, one tracing the line of Mac’s jaw, another lifting a curl of regrown hair. It was the first time the Sinzi had touched her other than in Noad’s role of physician; Mac’s eyes widened in surprise, but she didn’t move. “I—all of my selves—hold a different view of your worth.”

Friendship as she understood it—or something more akin to the assessment of an experienced diplomat?
Mac discovered she didn’t care. The warmth inside her was enough. “Then listen to me, Anchen,” she urged. “Don’t expose yourself to the Ro. Let others do it. At least until we know more.” Mac shot a suspicious look at the dark tank. “That includes not coming here by yourself again. Protect yourself. Promise me.”

The Sinzi-ra didn’t answer immediately. Her fingers wove themselves into something complex and troubled, hard to make out in the low light.
Answering,
Mac thought irrelevantly,
the question of whether the alien held the glowing globe.
“A promise is a connection between those involved,” Anchen said at last. “Across any distance.”

Mac grinned. “That it is.”

“We do not make promises lightly.”

“Neither do I,” she assured the alien.
Never let go
.

Anchen gave an almost Human sigh. “I may have shown you too much of the Sinzi view of the universe.”

“Fair’s fair,” Mac replied. “You know more about Humans than most Humans do.”

That shivering laugh, then the other seemed to come to some decision, for her fingers unfolded with blinding rapidity. “Then we shall exchange promises, Mackenzie Connor, for such a connection must be forged both ways.”

Uh-oh
. “What would I have to promise, Sinzi-ra?” Mac asked, wary at last.

“To bring me something for my collection.”

Somehow, Mac knew the wording was precise.
Bring.
Had Anchen elicited the same promise from Nik every time he’d ventured on her behalf? Complete the journey. Come back where you started.

The Sinzi ethic.

That to do so meant surviving whatever might intervene was in a sense incidental to Anchen. It was finishing the cycle that mattered.

The distinction, to quote Fourteen, was irrelevant.
Mac didn’t hesitate. “I promise.”

Anchen leaned forward, tilting her head so the eye Mac associated with Casmii, the judge, faced her most directly. “What is promised will bind us both, Mackenzie Connor. Are you sure?”

“If you promise to protect yourself from the Ro, I promise to bring you something for your collection,” Mac stated, content to finally encounter common sense when dealing with aliens. “I’m sure.”

She could just make out Anchen’s half bow. At no command Mac detected, the light from the floating globe increased until she had to narrow her eyes. The Sinzi-ra lowered her long neck so they were looking directly at one another before she raised her fingers, their tips curling inward to form a ring like
lamnas
in front of each pair of eyes. “I so promise,” she said, holding that posture. “We are bound.”

Then: “I promise.” “And I.” “Over my better judgment, I promise also.” “You have my promise, Mac.”

Finally: “Promise given and accepted. We are bound.”

Every voice the same in tone, the words alone differed. The Sinzi-ra uncurled her long fingers then intertwined them, rings slipping back and forth like raindrops.

Mac realized she’d been addressed, for the first time, by each of Anchen’s individual minds.
Not that she had a clue who was who.

For a fleeting instant, Mac wondered if she’d somehow managed to commit herself to something far stranger than she could possibly imagine.
Again.

Then she shrugged.

“You’re quiet.”

Mac waved one hand, the other holding her bag. “Thinking,” she explained. They were almost at the hangar; she could tell by the way the floor had become a down-turned ramp. The Sinzi-ra had left the tank room with her, bidding them both farewell in the corridor. Sing-li’s eyes had been like saucers at the sight of the alien, but he’d asked no questions.

Until now. “Everything all right?”

She glanced up at Sing-li. Seeing the concern in his face, she decided against flippant. “More or less,” she admitted. “It’s suddenly real—the move offworld, going to Base. Leaving Emily—the rest of you. Didn’t feel that way this morning.”