Lark stared at the blur-cloth canopy, with moonlight glimmering beyond.
I remain in darkness, on Jijo, he thought, yearning to see once more by the radiance that had filled his dream. A light that seemed about to reveal distant vistas.
Ling spoke to him later that day, when their lunch trays were slipped into the tent by a nervous militiaman.
“Look, this is stupid,” she said. “Each of us acting like the other is some kind of devil spawn. We don’t have time for grudges, with your people and mine on a tragic collision course.”
Lark had been thinking much the same thing, though her sullen funk had seemed too wide to broach. Now Ling met his eyes frankly, as if anxious to make up for lost time.
“I’d say a collision’s already happened,” he commented.
Her lips pressed a thin line. She nodded.
“True. But it’s wrong to blame your entire Commons for the deeds of a minority, acting without authority or —”
He barked a bitter laugh. “Even when you’re trying to be sincere, you still condescend, Ling.”
She stared for a moment, then nodded. “All right. Your sages effectively sanctioned the zealots’ attack, post facto, by keeping us prisoner and threatening blackmail. It’s fair to say that we’re already—”
“At war. True, dear ex-employer. But you leave out our own casus belli.” Lark knew the grammar must be wrong, but he liked showing that even a savage could also drop a Latin phrase. “We’re fighting for our lives. And now we know genocide was the Rothen aim from the start.”
Ling glanced past him to where a g’Kek doctor drew increasing amounts of nauseating fluid from the air vents of a qheuen, squatting unconscious at the back of the shelter. She had worked alongside Uthen for months, evaluating local species for possible uplift. The gray’s illness was no abstraction.
“Believe me, Lark. I know nothing of this disease. Nor the trick Ro-kenn allegedly pulled, trying to broadcast psiinfluentials via your Egg.”
“Allegedly? You suggest we might have the technology to pull off something like that, as a frame-up?”
Ling sighed. “I don’t dismiss the idea entirely. From the start you Jijoans played on our preconceptions. Our willingness to see you as ignorant barbarians. It took weeks to learn that you were still literate! Only lately did we realize you must have hundreds of books, maybe thousands!”
An ironic smile crossed his face, before Lark realized how much the expression revealed.
“More than that? A lot more?” Ling stared. “But where? By Von Daniken’s beard — how?”
Lark put aside his meal, mostly uneaten. He reached over to his backpack and drew forth a thick volume bound in leather. “I can’t count how many times I wanted to show you this. Now I guess it doesn’t matter anymore.”
In a gesture Lark appreciated, Ling wiped her hands before accepting the book, turning the pages with deliberate care. What seemed reverence at first, Lark soon realized was inexperience. Ling had little practice holding paper books.
Probably never saw one before, outside a museum.
Rows of small type were punctuated by lithographed illustrations. Ling exclaimed over the flat, unmoving images. Many of the species shown had passed through the Danik research pavilion during the months she and Lark worked side by side, seeking animals with the special traits her Rothen masters desired.
“How old is this text? Did you find it here, among all these remnants?” Ling motioned toward a stack of artifacts preserved by the mulc spider, relics of the long-departed Buyur, sealed in amber cocoons.
Lark groaned. “You’re still doing it, Ling. For Ifni’s sake! The book is written in Anglic.”
She nodded vigorously. “Of course. You’re right. But then who—”
Lark reached over and flipped the volume to its title page.
A PHYLOGENETIC INTERDEPENDENCE PROFILE OF ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS ON THE JIJOAN SLOPE
“This is part one. Part two is still mostly notes. I doubt we’d have lived long enough to finish volume three, so we left the deserts, seas, and tundras for someone else to take on.”
Ling gaped at the sheet of linen paper, stroking two lines of smaller print, below the title. She looked at him, then over toward the dying qheuen.
“That’s right,” he said. “You’re living in the same tent with both authors. And since I’m presenting you with this copy, you have a rare opportunity. Care to have both of us autograph it? I expect you’re the last person who’ll get the chance.”
His bitter sarcasm was wasted. Clearly she didn’t understand the word autograph. Anyway, Ling the biologist had replaced the patronizing alien invader. Turning pages, she murmured over each chapter she skimmed.
“This would have been incredibly useful during our survey!”
“That’s why I never showed it to you.”
Ling answered with a curt nod. Given their disagreement over the lightness of gene raiding, his attitude was understandable.
Finally, she closed the volume, stroking the cover. “I am honored by this gift. This accomplishment. I find I cannot grasp what it must have taken to create it, under these conditions, just the two of you.…”
“With the help of others, and standing on the shoulders of those who came before. It’s how science works. Each generation’s supposed to get better, adding to what earlier ones knew.…”
His voice trailed off as he realized what he was saying.
Progress? But that’s Sara’s apostasy, not mine!
Anyway, why am I so bitter? So what if alien diseases wipe out every sapient being on Jijo? Weren’t you willing to see that as a blessing, a while ago? Didn’t it seem an ideal way to swiftly end our illegal colony? A harmful invasion that should never have existed in the first place?
Over the course of Uthen’s illness, Lark came to realize something — that death can sometimes seem desirable in abstract, but look quite different when it’s in your path, up close and personal.
If Harullen the Heretic had lived, that purist might have helped Lark cling to his belief in Galactic law, which for good reason forbade settlements on fallow worlds. It was our goal to atone for our ancestors’ egotistical sin. To help rid Jijo of the infestation.
But Harullen was gone, sliced to bits by a Rothen robot, and now Lark grappled with doubts.
I’d rather Sara were right. If only I could see nobility here. Something worth enduring. Worth fighting for.
I don’t really want to die.
Ling pored through the guidebook again. Better than most, she could appreciate the work he and Uthen spent their adult lives creating. Her professional esteem helped bridge the chasm of their personalities.
“I wish I had something of equal value to give you,” she said, meeting his eyes again.
Lark pondered.
“You really mean that?”
“Of course I do.”
“All right then, wait here. I’ll be right back.”
At the rear of the shelter, the g’Kek physician indicated with twined eyestalks that Uthen’s condition was unvaried. Good news, since each change till now had been for the worse. Lark stroked his friend’s chitin carapace, wishing he could impart comfort through the gray’s stupor.
“Is it my fault you caught this bug, old friend? I made you go with me into the station wreckage, rummaging for alien secrets.” He sighed. “I can’t make up for that. But what’s in your bag may help others.”
He lifted Uthen’s private satchel and took it back to Ling. Reaching inside, he felt several slablike objects, cool to the touch.
“Earlier, we found something that you might help me learn to read. If you meant your promise.”
He put one of the flat lozenges in her hand — pale brown and smooth as glass, with a spiral shape etched on each face.
Ling stared at it for several duras. When she looked up, there was something new in her countenance. Was it respect for the way he had cornered her? Trapping her with the one other trait they shared — a compelling sense of honor?
