HOSTS OF SISTERS from the far raft systems inundated Raia-el, more than even the Kiri-el refugees, who thankfully had their new raft started by now. Merwen was constantly gathering food for the guests and nursing those who succumbed to the mysterious breath-shortening air from the soldier-place. Most returned to the soldier-place as soon as they recovered, but as more returned from second and third rounds of air-strangling, Merwen's steps and swimming strokes grew slower and heavier. Some of the guests huddled listlessly in seasilk blankets, talking anxiously of children they had left at home as far as a hundred raft-lengths away. “What if the soldiers come for our children next?”
“Send the Valans back,” one sighed. “Yes, close the door. Our lifeshaper says that breathmicrobes will drive them out.”
Amid all the sisters bustling in and out, Siderite arrived as usual with his two guards, who no longer bothered to enter the silkhouse but stolidly flanked the door and played games with little flat spotted leaves. Siderite himself was not really a soldier, despite his plumage; he proved it by stripping to his shorts, when out of sight of the guards. Merwen liked Siderite, thinking that he was almost as sisterly as Spinel.
Now Siderite paused uncertainly, as he watched Merwen adjust a blanket around a witnesser who had not yet regained consciousness.
“Share the day,” said Merwen, a little out of breath.
“Well, look, I ⦔ Siderite's hand waved aimlessly, like a confused angelfish. “That is, if it's a bad day for youâa lot of guests you've got here,” he finished.
“So what's one more?”
Siderite flashed a smile. “Thanks, I'd get an awful hassle for a blank report.”
Merwen got up. “Come, we'll see what Usha's up to.”
In the lifeshaping chamber, Usha was staring at a very complex three-dimensional clickfly web, the sort that only experts learn well. The pattern was full of short, dense stretches stuck together at geometric angles. The connections represented atoms of a living molecule.
“Share the day, Inconsiderate One,” said Siderite.
Usha had not heard him, Merwen thought, knowing that preoccupied stare. “It still doesn't fit,” Usha grumbled. “
Shora
, I'm as thickheaded as a seaslug. Why can't I get the structure to fit?”
Siderite cleared his throat and inspected the model.
Merwen tapped Usha's shoulder. “Dear one, he wants to know what it is.”
“The air poison, what else? It's volatile, so all I get is traces to analyze. And I'm so close, too.”
“Oh, I see,” said Siderite. “Agent Two-Six, that's what you're looking for. If that line represents a methyl group, it belongs on the other side.”
“Is that it?” Usha asked. “For certain?”
“Of course it is. We've got canisters full of it.”
“Good. By tomorrow night I'll have an enzyme to chew up the poison.”
Siderite's mouth hung open. “You mean you'll go through the whole genetic designâtoday?”
“I should hope so,” said Usha indignantly. “It's a simple molecule.”
“May I observe your work? I'll stay out of your way.”
Usha looked him over. “You can stay if you share the work. My other apprentices are overworked enough.”
Merwen went back to the raft surface to spread the good news. The witnessers were cheered enormously to hear that the air poison would
be swept away. Merwen herself did not stay cheerful long. To relax, she swam out among the branches, where the last of the seed pods were hanging from bowed stalks. She wondered, Shora, what seeds have you sown for us now, and what unimagined horrors have yet to grow of them?
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At Planetary Headquarters, a pattern developed: the natives would collect up to fifty or so behind the fence, until the gas was released again. Then other natives in their boats would come to retrieve them, and within another hour replacements would begin to arrive. They always collected gradually, as if testing and retesting the limit to the soldiers' patience. Some patrols shooed their boats away and sank a few, but more natives would always swim in without boats. During the night the “invasions” diminished, and the next day only two or three natives appeared.
On the third day, Realgar watched from inside the garrison as natives arrived again. They collected faster than usual, reaching a hundred before the guards opened the gas canisters.
A few of them sagged and coughed, but they soon recovered. They pressed closer to the fence, a growing wall of purple flesh. And helicopters reported hundreds more on the way.
What was wrong with the gas? Was the shipment defective?
A spasm of fear passed through him, so fleeting that Realgar could not define just what scared him. It left only a cold sense of facing an unknowable enemy thing, and the urgent need to beat it back.
“Fire into the crowd,” suggested Jade.
That brought him short. It might come to that sometime, but so farâone had one's honor to consider, after all.
Seeing his look, Jade added irritably, “Well, fire over their heads, and maybe aim crooked. For Torr's sakeâ”
“Enough. Where's Sabas?”
“Sir?”
“Sabas, try convulsant gas; that should hold them.”
“There's none in stock, sir. It's on back order, for riot control.”
“Well,
expedite the order
, for Torr's sake. Iridis must have a warehouse full.” That was the first time he let slip an open slur on Iridis. Sabas showed no response, but then he wouldn't. “All right. Get me that trader, what's his name.”
Within minutes Realgar was in his office with the trader, Kyril. By
now, reports had the crowd outside at three hundred, half of them children.
In uniform now, Kyril was special consultant on native relations. Kyril put his fingers together and nodded slowly. “You realize, sir, you'll have to start shooting, sooner or later.”
“Does that include naked three-year-olds? How would you explain that to the Palace?”
“Well, now. You have to understand, sir, when I first came out here twenty years ago, the catfish weren't considered human at all, just another part of the natural fauna. You can't even mate with them properly, and to my mindâ” Kyril shifted his weight and sat forward. “Look, if you're going to call them people, you better understand just what kind of people they are. They never had to back down to anyone, not since before the rise of Torr, and they just plain don't know how. You'll have to blow up half the planet to teach them.”
Realgar thought, he should have let Jade get on with it before the kids started showing up with their mothers.
“There is one trick, though, that might just work,” Kyril reflected. “To buy some time. And to show you what kind of mentality you're dealing with.”
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From the front line of witnessers at the soldier-place, Lystra stared numbly at the fence wires that rose and spread in open, undulating patterns. Close up, they looked nothing like a clickfly web, just a crude mindless branching of coldstone lines. Their sheen flickered as clouds crossed the sun.
Somewhere behind those wires were her own lost sisters, eight of them by now from two different rafts. Why should Valans desire to keep eight Sharers among them, yet drive out all others with excruciating pain?
Her eyes flitted briefly toward Yinevra at her left, pressed in among the sweating bodies. Yinevra could barely sit up by herself, for she had not yet recovered from repeated doses of the air-poison. Her face was so grim yet pinched by the strain of it that Lystra could only shudder and look away.
A line of soldiers came out and filed past the fence before her. Lystra tensed every muscle; but the soldiers only stopped and waited. One of them was Nisi's lovesharer, and apparently their most respected wordweaver, if respect was the appropriate term. But a different one stepped
forward from the line, someone whom Lystra vaguely recognized: the coarse mud-colored headfur, the wide jawâ
“Kyril.” She struggled to adjust to the shape of him in his altered plumage.
Kyril smiled expansively. “Why, it's Lystra! Share the day, Lystra; I never expected to see you here.”
It was something of a relief to see the familiar trader, despite his transformation. The bad old days seemed idyllic compared to nowadays.
“You're too busy to share this place, Lystra,” Kyril said. “Those starworms keep you swimming night and day.”
“And you, Kyril? Does trade no longer keep you busy?” An admittedly nasty remark.
Kyril shrugged genially, and his pointed shoulder plumage exaggerated the gesture. “We're closing out, as you know. Everything's marked down; you should go have a look. We'll be sweeping our own rafts for seasilk from now on, uninhabited ones, so we won't share annoyance with you anymore.” He spoke as if sharing a great favor.
“But every raft has inhabitants.”
Kyril paused. “Uninhabited by Sharersâ”
“So you'll clear out all the other little sisterlings.” Lystra watched him distastefully.
“You don't share trust at all, do you. You'll see; we know a lot more about raft management than we did forty years ago.” Kyril crouched before her where she sat, so that their eyes were nearly level. “Listen, Lystra, what are you doing here, anyway?”
“Waiting for our lost sisters. It's been two weeks, for three of them. Have you seen them?”
“I know you're worried. But it won't help to keep torturing soldiers this way. Why do you think they share poison with you?”
“Torturing?” Lystra was uneasy. “If torture is shared, it is we who feel the pain. We come only to share speech.” Everything worked both ways, but Lystra herself had done no harm.
“But we're surrounded, Lystraâhundreds of you, and there's barely a hundred of us in here. It's driving us crazy.”
Yinevra said, “You were crazy to begin with.”
“And you're making it worse. What if we die of it?”
“Oh, no.” Mithril stood up. “Why should anyone die fromâfrom us coming to find our sisters?”
“Your witness, your
being
here, unasked, in our homeâit's too much to take, psychologically. For some of us,” Kyril added quickly.
“Then why do you keep invading our homes!” Yinevra rasped and coughed. “You're all dead, anyway: living, walking
dead
! Get out and close your doorâ” Yinevra heaved with coughing, and another sister came to hold her, to soothe her.
Others were shaking their heads. “It can't be,” said one. “What about the breathmicrobes, the new strain our northern sister lifeshaped? Does that share hurting, too?”
“Breathmicrobes?” Kyril raised his voice and shared a look with the other soldier, Nisi's lovesharer. “Lystra, you know how Valans feel about breathmicrobes. That alone will hasten death, I'm sure.”
“A childish fear,” Lystra curtly replied. She did not like the sound of this at all, but Kyril was no selfnamer, so there was no way to challenge him. The truth would have to be checked. Already the witnessers were returning to their boats. “No more deaths,” one sighed. “Too much pain already.”
Lystra got up; her legs stung, and she stretched them. She went to lend an arm to Yinevra, who would let no one but Lystra help her walk. As Yinevra got up she told Kyril, “You're responsible for yourself, Valan, even as our stonesick sisters are. Don't think you've seen our backs for good.”
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Realgar watched the natives begin to leave, some in boats, others just slipping beneath the waves. He could not figure it out. “They really believe that they're staring us to death?”
“Something like that,” Kyril said. “I tell you, they don't understand killing, or even almost-killing. They desperately want some rationale for what you've done.”
The mention of breathmicrobes sobered Realgar. “Do you really think the natives are behind those outbreaks of purple-skin?”
“Could be. There were rumors the last time, about the purple plague.”
“But why did they tell us? As a threat?”
“I told you, sir, they're as honest as servos. But they are not fools,” Kyril warned. “If you still want to avoid nastiness, release those prisoners before Lystra and her cohorts have time to think again. Out of pure generosity, of course.”
“Perhaps.” How thoroughly he had misread the drama, from start
to finish. He never intended to hold the prisoners indefinitely. Why had things blown out of proportion? And then, with all their insane bravery, why had the natives turned away with a bit of nonsense from Kyril?