FOR WEEKS NOW, Spinel had been getting by in Iridis, holding forth as a Spirit Caller amid the crowds on Center Way. He took up with another old Caller, Elaterite of Karias, who rented him half an attic room and bequeathed to him a cowled robe with deep pockets to collect change. Beyond rent and food, Spinel saved every bit he could toward a ferryship ticket for the Ocean Moon.
The coins mounted slowly, and he skimped on food. His breathmicrobes receded until only a tinge of lavender remained in his palms.
Still, business was pretty good, compared to Chrysoport. City folk expected the same thing villagers did, only they talked faster, let him
say less, and paid more. City gossip was a bit more luridâthe daily murders, refugee riots, and new trouble brewing out in Azurportâbut he soon got used to it. Then came the chilling news that the High Protector declared war on Shora.
Everyone else was thrilled to hear that Valedon would conquer another planet in a crusade for the Patriarch. Half the Spirit Callers on Center Way ran off to enlist.
Spinel was bewildered. “You can't fight a war up there,” he told old El. “There's nothing but women and kids.”
“What do you know about it?” said El. “The Commander says they're nothing but terrorists up there, concocting secret weapons.”
Spinel combed the gutter for a discarded newscube and showed it to El. At a touch, the face of the High Protector filled the cube, going on about the Purple Menace. Next came the Commander, General Realgar resplendent in stones and medallions. The general reported native “assaults” on Valan bases, even at Headquarters. Casualties were light, but many native prisoners had been taken, and “the situation was in hand.”
A familiar face filled the cube. Spinel gasped. “It's Merwen!” There were soldiers in the background, and the general spoke with Merwen in an oddly stilted way.
“Greetings, Protector. You must accept the authority of Valedon.”
Her lips moved woodenly. “I respect your authority.”
Then there were clips of the ocean, of helicopters buffeted by storms and boats entwined by giant octopods. Yet all the while the one face burned in Spinel's mind. “Shora. Oh, Shora,” he whispered.
El said, “You look like you've seen a ghost.”
“It was Merwen, I told you about her. Did you see the look she gave him?”
“She wished him to hell, I'm sure.”
“Not exactly. More like saying, Mister, you're driving yourself to hell.” At least Merwen was still there, alive, despite the ill-defined “assaults” and the general driving himself to hell. Was Lystra all right, too? More than anything, Spinel wished he had never left, though he dreaded to think what it must be like up there, ten times worse than with the Dolomites in Chrysoport. He had not yet saved half the fare for the ferryship.
As the next weeks passed, Palace reports were scanty, with little conventional combat, but a lot of shockwraiths blown up, and invidious
plagues that beset the troops. There were other rumors, though, spread by men and women home on leave. They said there was no war at all, just a lot of makework and phony patrols and maintaining the bases on a treacherous sea.
“I told you it was crazy,” Spinel told El over a cabbage-soup supper in their attic room. “Why'd the High Protector send an army in the first place?”
“It's the Purple Menace, haven't you heard?” El's voice lowered sepulchrally. “A creeping doom will come upon us all.”
“Purple nothing. You don't believe that stuff, do you?”
“Of course not. I suppose Talion just wants to keep his troops occupied so the generals don't plot to oust him, the way his own father came to power. That was the year my grandfather lost all his sheep in a snowstorm, and my father came to Iridis to work in a trainsweeper repair shop ⦠.”
Â
One day Spinel heard that native prisoners were on display before the Palace. It might be just a rumor, but Spinel ran down the blocks to the end of Center Way to see for himself.
Beyond the courtyard rose as always the majestic face of Palace Iridium, where Malachite and the Legions stood embalmed in mosaic tiles. At the top was the symbol of the Patriarch, whom Spirit Callers were supposed to harken. Spinel himself knew better now, though the “Spirit” he actually called remained elusive as ever.
There was no parade in the courtyard, but the crowd was almost as dense as on the day the Torran Envoy was honored. By now, Spinel was expert at handling city crowds, and he soon wormed his way through.
There was a cage with bars, as if for lions, with a couple of burly guards to keep the crowd at a distance. Inside the cage were six Sharers, dusty and covered in loose prison gowns. Their wrists and ankles were manacled. They sat and stared, lifelessly, unseeing.
Then everything receded except one, shoulders still straight and tall, grimy and sullen and achingly beautiful. “Lystra! Lystra, say something, share a word with me!” The Sharer words rang strangely, here, after so many months.
The guard, a thick troll of a woman, waved a neuralprobe at him. “What are you jabbering, almsman? Catfish can't talk. You that desperate for a client?”
Onlookers laughed and hooted and sketched starsigns, followed by obscene gestures. But Spinel ran past the guard and clung to the bars of the cage. “Lystra! Lystra,
speak to me, or I'll go Unspoken.”
Lystra's eyes did not turn, but her lips moved. “Stonetrader. Go join the death-hasteners with Kyril.”
She had shared speech with him at last, after all. A rush of joy overwhelmed him.
Another Sharer was scandalized. “Quiet, Intemperate One. They're
Unspoken,
all of them.”
“It's Merwen's Valan pet,” Lystra snapped. “He was one of us.”
“Indeed.” The Sharer looked out at him with interest. “Have you a selfname, sister?”
The guard caught him by the hair and spun him around. “A miracle,” she mused. “A Spirit Caller brought speech to the deaf and dumb.”
Spinel winced as his hair tore at the roots, but he dared not risk the neuralprobe. “They're my sisters,” he tried to explain.
The guard snorted. “If they're your sisters, I'm the Patriarch.” Her huge jaw lifted. “Chains,” she called.
Manacles clamped on his arms and legs.
Spinel found his voice. “Hey! Hey, wait a minuteâ”
“Stop jabbering. You'll tell your tale to the High Protector,” the guard flung back at him.
Â
The office of the High Protector of Valedon was the finest room Spinel had seen since the passenger lounge of the
Cristobel,
on his way home with Lady Berenice. But whereas the lounge had been full of cushions and servo arms, this place was sharp and functional. Flat oblong panels pulsed with light behind the massive desk, where sat the Protector himself, a granite-faced man who seemed almost a part of his desk. Spinel's seat was a polished black curve that had risen cleverly from the floor.
The Sharers, still manacled, sat on the floor in a semicircle. Between them and the door, the guards stood stolidly at attention.
The Protector spoke. “So you lived six months among the natives.” He paused as if about to pronounce judgment. “A pity we haven't met before.”
“Yes, my lord,” Spinel replied politely.
“Now. I understand you communicate extraordinarily well with these ⦠women.”
“Well, IâI hope so, my lord.”
The Protector said flatly, “Ask them why they cause my troops so much trouble.”
Spinel blinked and swallowed. He glanced warily at Lystra. “Um ⦠the âProtector' wants to know,” he said in Sharer, “why you share trouble with death-hasteners.”
He expected an explosion. Instead, Lystra calmly asked, “Are you a selfnamer yet?”
Spinel recalled what Merwen had said of Uriel. “I'm a âSpirit Caller.' That's getting close, Merwen says.”
“Then see that your children remove these chains.”
Embarrassed, Spinel looked to the Protector and wondered how much he understood.
“Unchain them,” the Protector ordered. The guards did so. The Sharers promptly slipped off their prison gowns. Nevertheless, the Protector waved away the guards. “Spinel, why do they remove their clothes?”
“Well, I'm not sure.” Spinel felt like a hinged door, pulled in both directions at once. “Lystra, why don't you keep your plumage on? It's just polite, on Valedon.”
“Because it's filthy and shameful. You share the shame yourself, hiding in a blanket on a day so warm. Your sweat smells stale.”
Spinel looked at the Protector again and wondered how he would react if Spinel actually followed Lystra's example and slipped out of his robe. He felt a hysterical impulse to laugh; if only Ahn and Melas could see him now, before the High Protector of Valedon, they would faint away of amazement.
Then he looked more closely at Lystra. Dark welts crossed her arms and breasts, and her legs were torn and scabbed. A chill seized him until his teeth shook. There was nothing to laugh at, here.
“Spinel. Spinel?” The Protector had been calling him. Spinel forced his gaze back. “Spinel, ask her why Sharers do not obey my troops.”
He was beginning to understand, now. He could guess where Lystra's welts had come from. His throat thickened until he could barely swallow. “Lystra,” he said hoarsely, “why is it that Sharers do not do things that soldiers ask?”
“Soldiers order,” the Protector corrected in Valan.
“I don't know the Sharer words for âorder' or âobey.'”
The Protector said nothing. Apparently he did not know the words either.
Lystra said, “We used to do everything the Valans asked, out of pity for their sickness. Then the death-hasteners sickened worse and shared unspeakable acts. So we Unspoke them.”
“What acts?”
“Silence,” the Protector ordered. “What I must know isâ”
“They took our sisters and put coldstone things around their heads, from which alien thought came and burst the door of self untilâ”
“Silence.” The word cracked like a whip.
One of the guards extended a neuralprobe. Spinel could not tell what the guard did with it, but then Lystra's breath hissed and her muscles pulled into hard knobs. “Until-they-died.” Lystra's voice squeezed out as if pressed between rollers. “Then-sisters-came-from-all-over-and-witnessedâ”
“Stop it.”
Spinel lunged toward her. Pain streaked through him, pulling every tendon from the bone. He skidded and fell; the cool floor hit his elbows. The pain dizzied him, and red blotches winked before his eyes.
When his head cleared, the guard was saying, “All it took was a touch on him. What's wrong with
them?”
The other guard still had her neuralprobe set at Lystra's neck. Lystra went on with her monologue, though her hands were losing color, and Spinel thought, She'll go white any minute and maybe never speak again, but he was too weak to say another word.
“Enough,” said the Protector. “I got one talking, at least. So much for Sardish mindbending. Ship the lot back, with the almsman.”
So for the third time Spinel crossed the sky between worldsâthis time, in the prison hold of an Iridian warship.
ONCE CLICKFLIES WERE hopelessly entrenched again, Realgar changed his strategy. Jade's staff, with the help of a few “stonesick” informants, deciphered the insect communication code. Unspoken or not, Sharers would keep no more secrets from him.
It came as something of an anticlimax to hear, after all, that Talion had gotten the natives to talk.
Jade was outraged. “Trollbones for that. His staff's no better than mine.”
“A Spirit Caller did it,” said the general. “Got them talking in no time, even the Protector's daughter.”
“A Spirit Caller! But that's ludicrous!”
“Yes.” His lip curled slightly. “Talion even sent this Spirit Caller back to us, to help us out.”
Color rose in her cheeks. “So Talion thinks he got an almsman to do what all my staff couldn't. The nerve of those catfish. That Protector's daughterâ”
“Never mind. Now that you've got the clickfly code licked, who cares if they talk or not? At least they can't fraternize with the troops.” The troops were getting to be a problem, he knew. Too many Iridians went soft and carried sob stories back home.
The only problem now was that Siderite was without native informants for the time being. There had to be a “stonesick” lifeshaper somewhere on the globe, and Realgar was sure one would turn up. In the meantime, he thought it would be wise to pay a call on the scientist, to smooth his ruffled feathers after the strike on the lifeshaping places. So he went to visit Siderite in his laboratory.
Siderite stood there between his lab benches, with his hair askew and a black apron over his fatigues. He looked more like a mess cook than anything else, Realgar thought. How absurd that the success of this entire campaign should depend upon such a person. There must be an alternative, Realgar told himself for the hundredth time, but he had yet to find it.
To his relief, Siderite accepted his explanations and apologies with equanimity. Relief turned to suspicion; the man must be holding something back. Had Siderite sent covert aid to the enemy again?
Siderite shrugged absently, and his gaze wandered to the ceiling. “There's little I can do about it, is there.”
“Of course not. Your understanding is appreciated.”
“It will be hard on them, at swallower season ⦔
“But there will be no swallowers this season, at least not in inhabited regions.” The House of Aragonite had developed a repellent which would keep the seaswallowers away from all military bases, which meant away from most native raft systems as well. Realgar wondered why the traders had not done so, years earlier. They claimed that the natives disapproved, that they wanted the beasts to come, but that made little sense to him. In fact, it was galling to have to protect natives along with his troops, and he hoped it would not be interpreted as a weakness.
“ ⦠they will decentralize all the more,” Siderite was saying. “My guess is, within a few weeks you'll have ten times as many lab warrens to police as before.”
Realgar's attention snapped back. “What's that? Ten times as many?”
“Just a guess, mind you. That's what I would do, if I were them: scatter little lifeshaping places in holes all over the raft. For that matter, plant a few vines in some of the medium-sized raft seedlings, since the seaswallowers aren't coming. Leave spare âlaboratories' floating all over the place.” Siderite nodded to himself. “Yes, Usha will think of that.”
“What are you saying?” Realgar snapped.
“As it is, every cell of every living raft contains a whole library of all the basic knowledge and skills Sharers possess.”
“A
library,
in a cell?”
“A chromosome library. Trillions of bits of data on molecular chains, coiled up so small you can't even see it. In every cell of raftwood. Billions of cells in every raft seedling, each the seed of an entire Sharer life and culture.”
Realgar gripped the lab bench. “Why didn't you tell me this before?”
Siderite wheeled and shouted at him. “I told you the whole planet was their laboratory! I'd have said a lot more, if I knew what you had in mind. Now get out of my lab and stay out.”
Astonished though he was, Realgar waited. He saw that Siderite's
hands were shaking, and not just from anger. “You can send me back to Iridis for all I care.” Siderite added in an unsteady voice.
The man still feared him, Realgar decided, so he could let the lapse pass. “You will leave when your work is finished, not before.” Realgar turned sharply and left without permitting a reply. A library in every cell of raftwood ⦠. What an infernally twisted riddle this planet was.
Â
On a morning two weeks after the lab warrens were hit, Realgar took a hard look at his face in the shaving mirror. It seemed grayer than the usual fair cast of his cheeks and jaw. A jab at the light switch turned the gray to lavender.
His fist crashed on the sink. Of course the breathmicrobes were harmless, the medics insisted over and over. Still, his hand shook as he lifted the razor. Emotions flashed in successionâfear, denial, then a curious sense of release, as if he had yielded something that he had not wanted to win. Then anger washed out everything else. The natives, the damned catfishâ
they
had violated him, in an intensely personal way. His pulse throbbed at his temples, and he breathed slowly for a few minutes to get himself under control.
Realgar turned to the monitor plate on the wall. “Get Doctor Nathan, now.”
The doctor's voice came on, but he had little help to give. “General, we've done the best we can, but nothing works, so far. At Headquarters alone, nine out of ten men are either purple now or on their way to it soon. Not one of our drugs makes a dent in it. I'm sorry, sir.” Nathan sounded decidedly nervous as he finished.
“You mean there's no cure? How far has it spread?” Realgar demanded.
“To over half the bases. The spores are airborne, so they can't be contained.”
“And the natives are behind it all.”
Nathan hesitated. “I find it difficult to escape that conclusion, sir. It's extremely unlikely that a microbe of this type would develop sudden resistance to the entire range of our antibiotics.”
“I'll burn out a few of those rafts,” Realgar muttered. “I'll burn them to a cinder.”
“Perhaps ⦔ Nathan's voice trailed off.
“Speak up, Doctor.”
“As far as the medical problem goes, a more practical approach might be to get the natives to produce an antidote.”
Realgar was floored. “You mean you have no hope of finding a cure?” This might actually get serious. A purple population on Valedon? Unthinkable. Talion would certainly see it that way; he might even quarantine the Ocean Moon.
Then another thought sent a shock down his spine. “The satellites. Are they also ⦠?”
“Some are contaminated, probably all,” said Nathan. “We'll get rid of it eventually, General. Not overnight, that's all. It may take Hospital Iridis several years to analyze the strain.”
Realgar was barely listening. He dismissed the doctor and put in a top security call to his private quarters on Satellite Amber. Just in time he ordered the visual transmission corrected for his skin tone.
On his viewing stage, lightshapes sparkled and sprang into form. The peasant-skirted nanny servo huddled the two children into view. They still wore their nightclothes, and their eyes were heavy with sleep, but they giggled and squirmed at the sight of their father. Elmvar waved furiously with both hands. Cassiter clasped her hands demurely, but the ends of her lips curled into an elfin smile. “Papa, what a surprise! Are you coming home, Papa? Oh, please, will you take us hunting when you come?”
“Not yet, Cassi. Just called to see ⦠how you are.” He swallowed the tightness in his throat. Already he saw the lavender tinge in her cheeks, just the faintest trace he used to see in Berenice, before the antibiotic had finished its work. But there was no antibiotic now. How would Cassi react once she realized what was happening to her?
Cassiter pouted “Oh, I'm all right, Papa. Nothing's new at all. It's dreadfully boring up here, without you.”
The natives, Realgar thought; they've taken my children. My children are hostage to their microbes.