KEEP THE WORDS COMING
1563 4D
They stayed for hours. Stories ran back and forth across the tables, and the brew tanks stacked high. The three little girls ran up and down the tables, knocking over the tanks and sending plates and food flying, until Deen grabbed Billy T and tickled her with fingers that knew exactly where to go, and Billy T screamed and jumped up and down and begged for more, and then Janny and VeeVee joined in.
Ezzar, now between Andrew and Engel, took a deep breath. Better say it all before someone asked her. She leaned forward so Jeddin could hear her. “Rennie‘s dead,” she said, making her lips and tongue move and hearing the words go out of her like stones too large for her mouth.
No one near her said anything. Jeddin‘s look grew grim, and his eyes filled with tears; he reached out and took her hand. Andrew‘s arm, and Engel‘s, came around her to hold her gently. The four of them let the noise from the children and the two women wash around them for a while. At the end of the table nearest the understreet, Nazrelo and Marande and a few soldiers laughed over a joke.
“You loved him so much,” Jeddin said to her softly, leaning close across the narrow table, “and he loved you the same. Do you want to say more about it?”
“Not now,” she said, glad at least that the words were out of her, that they couldn’t get any bigger inside. “There’ll be time enough later. I just had to say that much right now.”
Andrew shook his head slowly. “I’ve missed him. Now—“
“Please, later,” Ezzar cut in.
“Okay. Sorry.” Andrew nodded, kept his arm around her. Tense at first, she let herself relax a little at a time. She watched Janny jump on and off the bench at the far side of the table while Deen pretended to scold her.
“So tell us what happened to the aliens,” Engel said into the lull; his voice made Ezzar start. He looked at his father.
“They’re gone, nearly all of them. They’re— they’ve left, I think. I’ve learned a lot about them.” Andrew seemed to Ezzar to be keeping something back. She glanced at Marra and Deen. They smiled, their arms around the three little girls. Andrew went on. “We knew they were shipping andros on board. That was for food, and to make into soldiers. The bugboys.”
“Those were andros? Not aliens?” Deen, sitting next to Jeddin, let go of Billy T and leaned nearer.
“Yes. Arlen sold the aliens most of the andros from his farms. The aliens just made them over, like you’d unravel a piece of knitting and make a new and different one with the same skein. They had canisters packed with andros in suspension. But they also kept human bodies, in these shining coffins.”
“No. These people had been suspended for thousands of years, in some kind of preservation field. I’m no scientist. They might have been from before the Colonization. There were a lot of them on board the ship.” Andrew took a bite of the few remaining tubers in front of him.
Jeddin started in. “Andrew and I wondered what they were all about. At first we were surprised that we got on board so easily. But we realized no human could operate the ship — its controls only work in innerspace, really. And andros didn’t dare get near it.
“I think that’s why they considered a guard a formality. A couple of aliens, using andro bodies, stayed on the ship and tended the weapons. They weren’t worried. They’d conditioned humans to stay away, and the andros too. They just didn’t think of humans who could get into innerspace, and andros turning human. The virus fooled them.”
Andrew continued. “And they didn’t think we could get either as curious or as greedy or as desperate as we did. Alien friends, outcasts, showed us how to pilot the ship, and showed us its power source, and how to hide it.” Andrew raised his tank and emptied it.
Engel asked, “You mean we have a space ship, a real one?”
“In a way.” Andrew smiled. “But we need the aliens to help us fly it. Thank goodness they’re not all gone. It’s our insurance against the corps muscling in and breaking our deal.”
Ezzar asked, “You have aliens with you? Like Deen and Marra do?”
Andrew raised an eyebrow at her, glancing at Deen and Marra. “Let’s talk about that later.”
Ezzar persisted. “But what’s to prevent the regionals and the City and DurCorp and the others from just taking over again? We fought so hard.” The food and drink and talk wearied her, and the garish lights around her clashed and streaked with haze.
After a sudden lurch and a glare at Deen, who sat beside him, Jeddin answered, “Gullinder wants that ship very badly. There’s been no space travel for humans here in thousands of years, not since the Colonization. Now we have the ship, we know how it can be piloted, and the government and the corps have no one else who can do it. They hold the fuel supplies for the ship, all the actinides and lanthanides, refined to alien specification. And we have— guidance. Hey, stop that.” He glared at Deen again.
Ezzar looked across at Marra, sitting on the far side of Deen from Jeddin. Marra‘s eyes sparkled with mischief. Those women wasted no time. Ezzar looked at their fuzz-covered pale heads, like slightly bumpy eggs, and consoled herself. At least she had more hair in the back than they did. She wondered at this trivial thought.
A young woman squeezed in next to Engel, flashing a grin. “This is Madhvi,” he said to everyone.
The young woman, her hair plaited up tight in a coil, nodded all around. “What happened to all the aliens around here?” she asked, scanning the group with big dark-brown eyes. “This time of the day-cycle they’re all over this part of the zone.”
“They’re gone,” Andrew said. “At least most of them are. They ran out of hosts.”
Ezzar asked, “Even with all those andros available to make over and use? Why didn’t they just take over part of the City and get a new supply?” She looked across at Jeddin, and relaxed in the warmth Andrew and Engel gave off. There’d be time to cry and sleep later. Better to keep the words coming and going.
Andrew looked away at the jumping, banging crowd celebrating in the street outside. “I don’t know. They seem to have rules to follow, but they aren’t like ours. Some things they won’t do. And when they celebrate qaqanhialh, everything else gets forgotten.”
Jeddin said, “That’s when they make more of their kind. That’s what they were doing in the Domehall; I think the ship had no proper space for their gathering. The new aliens don’t usually stay in the same world as their creators — they go off to innerspace to incubate and develop. The creators have to return quickly to their host bodies after such a creation, and feed.
“The andro bodies they used at the Domehall weren’t their real hosts, just a substitute. The real human bodies they have — the ones in the coffins, the suspended ones from long ago — they apparently don’t let them off the ship, except when they first need to reconnoiter.
“My guess is that the strain of making offspring taxed the andro host bodies so severely that they deteriorated far in advance of their normal time. So without the ship and their normal hosts, they died.”
Andrew shook his head. “I don’t think they’re dead. I think they just left this range of time and space.”
Jeddin shrugged. “Maybe it amounts to the same thing, as far as we’re concerned. You’re used to thinking in terms of an afterlife, and I’m not. Maybe we both have to rethink it all.”
Ezzar remembered Aswar Nagrasai and the man who had treated her leg. “And the relocations are off?”
Nazrelo looked down from the end of the table. “I heard on the way here there’ll be no relocs, no SRDs, for at least a year. Everything stays as it is now.” Ezzar smiled. At last, a beginning.
Jeddin said, “That’s got to be Arlen‘s death. It’ll start the power struggles. A year from now it should all be straightened out, and then we’ll see whether another fight is called for.” He turned and called to a server, “More brew!”
Deen nudged him. “Where do you pour it all in that little body of yours?”
“I’m bigger on the inside,” he answered. A laugh from the others.
“Not always just the inside,” she shot back, with a grin. Jeddin‘s face darkened to a light red. Ezzar decided she’d want to sit down with him later, and talk with him about Rennie.
Engel and Madhvi stood up. Engel said, “Father, come with us to my place and stay with us. We’ve got a lot of room. We threw out a mass of junk just before the reloc call, and we’ve got three extra rooms.”
Andrew looked at Ezzar, and his eyes were a melting brown. “Where are you going to go? I’d like it if you’d take a room with Engel for the night, at least, and get some rest. I want to talk with you, and be sure you’re all right.”
What was she going to do? Ezzar looked at Engel, who nodded. She looked at Madhvi, who nodded and smiled. No, damn it, she didn’t want pity. And if he was looking to start something with her, no. “I’ll be fine, thanks. I’m going back out to Engrammatic.”
“That’s garbage.” Deen‘s rude alto voice cut in from across the table. “Right now you need people around, and they’re offering you a space all to yourself, with them right there for you. What more could you ask?”
Jabbed by the words, Ezzar answered, “I want to think and just be alone.” She lowered her eyes. The people at their table were all listening to her. “All right, just one night.” Andrew‘s face lit up with a smile. Ezzar wanted to say to him, as if she were one of the three little girls sitting sleepily with full bellies by Deen and Marra, that all she really wanted was to be kept warm.
Her dreams would be cold.
A boy hissed like an ultrasonic whistle from the street. Janny and the other two little girls woke up, popped up, and ran out to disappear among the dancers. Andrew jumped to his feet and stared after them. Engel reached behind Ezzar and took his father’s arm. “They’ll be fine,” she heard him say softly.
“Damn it, she’s my only little girl now,” Andrew said. “Why does she run away like that?”
“Father, she’s not—" Engel stopped himself. On the young man’s face appeared a look of mixed confusion and resolve. Ezzar caught his eye and shook her head ‘no’ very slightly. This looked like an argument over realities, and the time wasn’t right for that.
“Let’s go,” Andrew said. He offered a hand to Ezzar. “My lady,” he began, in a light tone. She stiffened, glaring at him, and he froze. How did he know to say that to her, the way Rennie used to?
He fumbled for words as she went ahead of him. “I’m sorry, I used to say that to— when—“
So where was his wife? Leil, was it? Ezzar snapped over her shoulder, “You should save it for her, then. You haven’t mentioned your wife even once.” Then a horrible thought struck her, and she stopped and turned at the entrance to the eatery. “Did you find her? Is she all right?”
Andrew‘s mouth set itself in a straight line, as stiff as his shoulders. Then the shoulders settled a bit. “Yes, I found her. And no, she’s gone. She died. Will you please come to Engel‘s and we can get some rest? I don’t want to talk any more now.”
Ezzar bit her lip. Then she nodded.
