“I hate him,” she says as I strap her into her suit. (It’s new—our engineers made it to withstand the pressure in the Xpelhi ship. It’s the most amazing human tech we’ve ever produced. Earth will be proud when they get the message.)
“If peace didn’t require me to go…” she says, frowns. “I hope they see that what he’s offering won’t help anyone. It never does.”
She sounds tired. I wonder if she’s been up nights with the playback again.
“It’s okay,” I say. “You can hate him if you want. No one expected you to love him like the last one did. It’s better not to carry the old feelings around. You live longer.”
“He’s different,” she says. “It’s terrible how it’s changed him.”
“All clones feel that way sometimes,” I say. “Peril of the job. Here’s your helmet.”
She takes it and smiles at me, a thank-you, before she pops it over her head and activates the seal.
“I feel like a snowman,” she says, which is what Hepta used to say. I wonder if anyone told Octa, of if she just remembered it from somewhere.
I stay near the bio-med readout while she’s on the Xpelhi ship; if anything starts to fail, the suit tells us. If her lungs have collapsed from the pressure there’s not much we can do, but at least we’ll know, and we can wake up the next one.
Her heart rate speeds up, quick sharp spikes on the readout like she’s having a panic attack, but that happens whenever Dorado 215 says something stupid. After a while it’s just a little agitation, and soon she’s safely back home.
She stands on the shuttle platform for a long time without moving, and only after I start toward her does she wake up enough to switch off the pressure in the suit and haul her helmet off.
I stop where I am. I don’t want to touch her; I’ve worked too hard on them to handle them. “Everything all right?”
She’s frowning into middle space, not really seeing me. “There’s nothing on the ship we could use as a weapon?”
Strange question. “I guess we could crash the shuttle into someone,” I say. “I can ask the engineers.”
“No,” she says. “No need.”
It was part of the message, the first rule: no war before Carthage comes. We don’t even have armed security– just guys who train with their hands, ready in case Octa tries to shove any more people in airlocks.
She hasn’t done that in a while. She’s getting worn down. It happens to them all, nearer the end.
“There’s been no war for four hundred years,” she says as we walk, shaking her head. “Have we ever gone that long before without fighting? Any of us?”
“Nope.” I grin. “Carthage is the best thing that hasn’t happened to us yet.”
Her helmet is tucked under one arm, and she looks down at it like it will answer her.
The Delegate Meeting happens every decade. It wasn’t mandated by Carthage; Wren Tetra-Yemenni began it as a way for delegates to have a base of reference, and to meet; no one has even seen the new Neptunian Elect since they picked her two years back, and they have to introduce Dorado 216.
We’re not allowed to hear what they talk about—it’s none of our business, it’s government stuff—but we hang around in the hallways just to watch them filing in, the humanoids and the Xpelhis puttering past in their cases. The Centauri AI has a hologram that looks like a stick insect with wings, and it blinks in and out as the signal from his ship gets spotty. I cover my smile, though—that computer sees everything.
On the way in, Dorado 216 leans over to Octa. “You won’t say anything, will you? It would be war.”
“No,” she says, “I won’t say anything.”
“It’s just in case,” he goes on, like she didn’t already give him an answer. “There’s no plan to use them. We’re not like that—it’s not like that. You never know what Carthage’s plans are, is all.” Then, more quietly, “I trusted you.”
“215 trusted me,” she says. “You want someone to trust you, try the next Yemenni.”
“Watch it,” he says. A warning.
After a second she frowns at him. “How can you want war, after all this effort?”
He makes a suspicious face before he turns and walks into the reception room with the rest of them.
Octa stands in the hall for a second before she follows him, shoulders back and head high. Yemmenis know their duties.
After the Delegate Meeting, Octa takes a trip to the Centauri AI. She’s back in a few hours. She didn’t tell anyone why she was going, just looks sad to have come back.
(Sometimes I think Octa’s mind is more like a computer than any of them, even more than Alpha. I wonder if I made her that way by accident, wishing better for them, wishing for more.)
In the mess, the pilots grumble that it was a waste of shuttle fuel.
“That program shows up anywhere they need it to,” one of them says. “Why did we have to drive her around like she’s one of the queens on Sextan? They should expire these copies before they go crazy, man.”
“Maybe she was trying to give us break from your ugly face,” I say, and there’s a little standoff at the table between the pilots and the techs until one of the language ops guys smoothes things over.
I stay angry for a long time. The pilots don’t know what they’re talking about.
Yemennis do nothing by mistake.
Alpha was the most skilled diplomat on the planet.
They don’t say so in the documentary; they talk about how kind she is and how smart she is and how she looks like a mix of everyone, and if you just listened to what they were saying you’d think she hardly deserved to go. There were a lot of people in line; astronauts and prime ministers and bishops all clamoring for the privilege.
And she got herself picked—she got picked above every one of them; she was the most skilled diplomat who ever lived. She could work out anything, I bet.
There’s an engineer down five levels who looks good to me, is smart enough, and we get married. We have two kids. (Someone will have to watch over the Yemennis when I’m gone, someone with my grandfathers’ talents for calibrating a needle; we’ve been six generations at Wren Yemmeni’s side.)
We celebrate four hundred years of peace. All the delegates put a message together, to be played in every ship, for the civilians. For some of them, it’s the first they’ve heard of the other languages. Everyone on the ship, twelve thousand strong, watches raptly from the big hangar and the gymnasium level, from the tech room and the bridge.
They go one by one, and I recognize our reception room as the camera pans from one face to another. They talk about peace, about their home planets, about how much they look forward to all of us knowing the message, when Carthage comes.
Wren Octa-Yemenni goes last.
“I hope that, as we today are wiser today than we were, so tomorrow we will be wiser than we are,” she says. Dorado 216 looks like he wants to slap her.
She says, “I hope that when our time comes to meet Carthage, we may say that we have fulfilled the letter and spirit of its great message, and we stand ready for a bright new age.”
Everyone in the tech room roars applause (Yemennis know how to talk to a crowd). Just before the video shuts off, it shows all the delegates side by side; Octa is looking out the window, towards something none of us can see.
One night, a year before she’s due to be expired, I find Octa in the development room. She’s watching the tube where Ennea is gestating. Ennea’s almost grown, and it looks like Octa’s staring at her own reflection.
“Four hundred years without a war,” she says. “All of us at a truce, talking and learning. Waiting for Carthage.”
“Carthage will come,” I promise, glancing at Ennea’s pH readout.
“I hope we don’t see it,” she says, frowns into the glass. “I hope, when it comes, all of us are long dead, and better ones have taken their places. Some people twist on themselves if you give them any time at all.”
