Year's Best SF 17

He tucked his prize inside the breast of his shipboard jumper, and went to knock on the round door. It opened, and the guards were there.

“I’m ready to leave now.”

The An-he looked out of the tunic display again. “By all means! But don’t be a stranger. Come and see me again, come often!”

That evening he searched the little tablet’s drive for his own name, for a message. He tried every password of theirs he could remember: found nothing, and was heartbroken. He barely noted the contents, except that it wasn’t about her work. Next day, to his great surprise, he was recalled to the castle. He met the An-he as before, and learned that the Ruling An would like to approve his mission, but the police were making difficulties.

“Speranza doesn’t mind having a tragedy associated with their showcase Project,” said the young king. “A scandal would be much worse, so they want to bury this. My partner and I feel you have a right to investigate, but we have met with resistance.”

There was nothing Patrice could do … and it wasn’t a refusal. If the alien royals were on his side, the police would probably be helpless in the end. Back in his cabin he examined the tablet again and realised that Lione had been keeping a private record of her encounter with “the KiAn issue.”

KiAn isn’t like other worlds of the Diaspora: they didn’t have a Conventional Space Age before First Contact. But they weren’t primitives when “we” found them, nor even Mediaeval. The An of today are the remnant of a planetary superpower. They were always the Great Nation, and the many nations of the Ki were treated as inferior, through millennia of civilisation. But it was no more than fifteen hundred standard years ago, when, in a time of famine, the An or “Heaven Born” first began to hunt and eat the “Earth Born” Ki. They don’t do that anymore. They have painless processing plants (or did). They have retail packaging—Cannibalism happens. It’s known in every sentient and pre-sentient biped species. What developed on KiAn is different, and the so-called “atavists” are not really atavist. This isn’t the survival, as some on Speranza would like to believe, of an ancient prehistoric symbiosis. The An weren’t animals, when this “stable genocide” began. They were people, who could think and feel. People, like us. 

The entry was text-only, but he heard his sister’s voice: forthright, uncompromising. She must have forced herself to be more tactful with the An-he! The next was video. Lione, talking to him. Living and breathing.

Inside the slim case, when he opened it, he’d found pressed fragments of a moss, or lichen. Shards of it clung to his fingers: it smelled odd, but not unpleasant. He sniffed his fingertips and turned pages, painfully happy.

Days passed, in a rhythm of light and darkness that belonged to the planet “below.” Patrice shuttled between the “station visitors quarters,” where he was the only guest, and the An castle. He didn’t dare refuse a summons, although he politely declined all dinner invitations which made the An laugh.

The odd couple showed no interest in Patrice at all, and did not return his calls. He might have tried harder to get their attention, but there was Lione’s journal. He didn’t want to hand it over; or to lie about it either.

Once, as they walked in the castle’s galleries, the insistent breeze nagging at him as usual, Patrice felt he was being watched. He looked up. From a high, curtained balcony a wide-eyed, narrow face was looking down intently. “That was the An-she,” murmured his companion, stooping to exhale the words in Patrice’s ear. “She likes you, or she wouldn’t have let you glimpse her … I tell her all about you.”

“I didn’t really see anything,” said Patrice, wary of causing offence. “The breeze is so strong, tossing the curtains about.”

“I’m afraid we’re obsessed with air circulation, due to the crowded accommodation. There are aliens about, who don’t always smell very nice.”

“I’m very sorry! I had no idea!”

“Oh no, Patrice, not you. You smell fresh and sweet.”

The entries in Lione’s journal weren’t dated, but they charted a progress. At first he was afraid he’d find Lione actually defending industrial cannibalism. That never happened. But as he immersed himself, reviewing every entry over and over, he knew Lione was asking him to understand. Not to accept, but to understand the unthinkable—

Compare chattel slavery. We look on the buying and selling of sentient bipeds, as if they were livestock, with revulsion. Who could question that? Then think of the intense bond between a beloved master, or mistress, and a beloved servant. A revered commanding officer and devoted troops. Must this go too? The An and the Ki accept that their way of life must change. But there is a deep equality in that exchange of being, which we “democratic individualists” can’t recognise—Patrice thought of the Ki-Anna’s scars.

The “deep equality” entry was almost the last.

The journal ended abruptly, with no sense of closure.

Lione’s incense—he’d decided the “lichen” was a kind of KiAn incense, perhaps a present from the An-he—filled his cabin with a subtle perfume. He closed the tablet, murmuring the words he knew by heart, a deep equality in that exchange of being, and decided to turn in. In his tiny bathroom, for a piercing moment it was Lione he saw in the mirror. A dark-skinned, light-eyed, serious young woman, with the aquiline bones of their North African ancestry. His other self, who had left him so far behind—

The whole journal was a message. It called him to follow her, and he didn’t yet know where his passionate journey would end.

When he learned that permission to visit the surface was granted, but the Ki-anna and the Interplanetary Affairs officer were coming too, he knew that the Ruling An had been forced to make this concession—and the bargaining was over. He just wished he knew why the police had insisted on escorting him. To help Patrice discover the truth? Or to prevent him?

He didn’t meet the odd couple until they embarked together. They were all in full protective gear: skin sealed with quarantine film, under soft-shell life-support suits. The noisy shuttle bay put a damper on conversation, and the flight was no more sociable. Patrice spent it encased in an escape capsule and breathing tanked air: the police insisted on this. He saw nothing of KiAn until he was crunching across the seared rubble of their landing field.

The landscape was dry tundra, like Martian desert colour-shifted into shades of grey and green. Armed Green Belts were waiting, with a landship and all-terrain hardsuits for the visitors.

“The An-he offered me a military escort,” said Patrice, freedom of speech restored by helmet radio. “What was wrong with that?”

“Sorry,” grunted Bhvaaan. “Couldn’t be allowed.”

The Ki-anna said nothing. He remembered, vividly, the way he’d felt at their meeting. There had been a connection, on her side too: he knew it. Now she was just another bulky Speranza doll, on a smaller scale than her partner. As if she’d read his thoughts, she cleared her faceplate and looked out at him, curiously. He wanted to tell her that he understood KiAn, better than she could imagine … but not with Bhvaaan around.

“You’ve been keeping yourself to yourself, Messer Ferringhi.”

“I could say the same of you two, Officer Bhvaaan.”

“Aap. But you made friends with the An-he.”

“The Ruling An were very willing to help me.”

“We’ve been working in your interest too,” said the Ki-anna. She pivoted her suit to look through the windowband in the landship’s flank. “Far below this plateau, back that way, was the regional capital. Were fertile plains, rich forests, towns and fields and parklands. The ‘roof of Heaven’ was never beautiful. It’s strange, this part hardly seems much changed—”

“Except that one dare not breathe,” she added, sadly.

On the shore of the largest ice sheet, the Lake of Heaven, the odd couple and Patrice disembarked. The Ki-anna led the way to a great low arch of rock-embedded ice. The Green Belts had stayed in the ship.

Everything was livid mist.

“We’re going under An-lalhar Lake alone?”

“The Green Belts’ll be on call. It’s not their jurisdiction down there. It’s a precious enclave where the Ki and the An are stubbornly dying together.” Bhvaaan peered at him. “It’s not our jurisdiction either, Messer Ferringhi. If we meet with violence we can protect you, but that’s after the event and it might not save your life. The people under the Lake don’t have a lot to lose and their mood is volatile. Bear that in mind.”

“I could have had an escort they’d respect.”

“You’re better off with us.”

They descended the tunnel. The light never grew less; on the contrary, it grew brighter. When they emerged,