Last Shadow (9781250252135) Read online

  Not like me, thought Thulium, lying awake with my mind spinning, so that when I wake up it feels like I was never asleep at all.

  All of a sudden Q-Bay lit up. So did the lab. Peter and Wang-Mu were standing there and a raven was fluttering to a nearby table.

  Without even waking Sprout up, Thulium transported herself and him to Descoladora, to the exact place on the map where Peter and Wang-Mu had first arrived.

  Sprout apparently could tell that he was no longer resting on upholstery. He was instantly awake and standing beside her.

  “They came back,” said Thulium. “I promised I’d wait till then, and I did.”

  “No interest in hearing them report on their findings?” asked Sprout, not sounding as exasperated as he certainly must feel.

  “They brought a raven with them. Probably the one they call Dog. The boss lady. But you can see that keas are all around us.”

  “They’ve already photographed everything here,” said Sprout. “Why didn’t we go somewhere else?”

  “It hasn’t been photographed,” said Thulium, “until it’s been done by scientists.”

  Except that in only about three minutes, the swarming keas had taken their cameras and everything else they brought. Their pockets were inside out or torn open. Thulium’s trousers were on the ground around her ankles.

  “This is going well,” said Sprout.

  A bird landed on Sprout’s shoulder. In a forced, gravelly voice, he said, “Wiggin and the Royal Mother said nobody else would come until we agreed.”

  “Are you Royal Son?” asked Thulium, before Sprout could answer.

  “Not speaking to you, girlchild,” said Royal Son. “I have been to your world. I know who you are.” To Sprout, Royal Son spoke again. “Why are you here?”

  “We are scientists who need to examine the life here on this planet,” said Sprout. “To see which plants and animals are originally from Earth, and which were native to this place.”

  “Why examine, when you can ask? Royal Mother asked and we answered. Do you think she’s a liar?”

  “We will ask different questions,” said Thulium.

  “But we will give the same answers,” said Royal Son. “Because we will only tell you what we want you to know. And you two? We have no reason to tell you anything. We have no reason to trust you. Your arrival here is proof that your word is worthless.”

  “We didn’t give our word,” said Thulium, sounding angry.

  “When you send emissaries to a strange land, either the emissaries speak for the whole or they don’t,” said Royal Son. “I went to your world, to your quarantine bay, and I saw that Peter and Wang-Mu were treated with great respect. You are children, and they let you play with their computers.”

  “We were doing the real work,” said Thulium. “While Peter and Wang-Mu just came and talked with birds.”

  “We are the inhabitants of this land,” said Royal Son, “and you are trespassers, not emissaries. When Dog returns, she will tell us how to respond to your lawbreaking.”

  “We broke no law that we knew of,” said Thulium.

  “You broke our laws, and you broke your own laws, by disobeying your leaders and doing what they had consented not to do. Do you think because we’re birds that we’re stupid?”

  “We have work to do while we wait for Dog to return,” said Thulium.

  “We have all your equipment,” said Royal Son. “What exactly will you work on?”

  Thulium had no answer. Sprout had been right—this was a mistake. She really hadn’t believed that these birds, the keas and the ravens, were fully intelligent beings. But clearly they were. Their chaotic behavior had been purpose-driven if not organized. Without their gear, there was no reason for Thulium and Sprout to stay.

  Thulium made the jump Outside and In, and she stood in Q-Bay with her pants around her ankles. Peter and Wang-Mu were being examined by doctors in non-contamination suits. Wang-Mu rose up on her examining table and looked at her. “Where’s Sprout?” she asked.

  Thulium looked where Sprout had been standing before, where he should be standing now. Somehow she had left him behind. But she had reached for him to carry him, just as she had to take him there. How could he not have arrived with her? Had she somehow lost him Outside? How would she ever find him again?

  Someone spoke over the intercom from the lab. It was Jane. “Sprout is not trapped Outside; I would have brought him in.”

  “Then he’s still in that meadow? With those insane birds?”

  “Are they as insane as little girls who arrive in a foreign land without a passport or the faintest whiff of a plan?” asked Jane.

  “I’ve got to go back for him,” said Thulium.

  “You will go nowhere,” said Jane. “If you try, I’ll just bring you right back here. Is that understood? Your jumping days are over, for the foreseeable future.”

  “That’s wrong! You can’t do that!” cried Thulium.

  “I do believe the common argument of children your age is, ‘That’s not fair!’” said Jane.

  “Sprout needs me!” shouted Thulium.

  “So you believe that Sprout cannot function well without you, his one-year-younger cousin?” asked Jane.

  “He shouldn’t have to face this alone,” said Thulium, trying to pretend to be calm, and failing.

  “I think it’s time for Sprout and for us to find out just what he is capable of doing without somebody there to boss him around,” said Jane.

  Thulium looked to Wang-Mu, hoping for some kind of moral support.

  Wang-Mu smiled wanly and lay back down so her examination could continue.

  A medical tech slapped a third, unoccupied examination table, and then pointed at Thulium.

  “You’re in quarantine now,” said Jane. “Obey whatever you’re told to do, and don’t argue or complain while people do the jobs they know how to do. Meanwhile, the grownups will consider whether there is any job that you can be trusted to do.”

  “You need me,” said Thulium.

  “No,” said Jane. “We need your skills. But they’re wrapped up in a complicated package. We have to learn what you’re good for before we dare to use you again.”

  Then Jane walked away from the intercom and left the lab.

  Thulium went to the examining table and jumped up onto it, then untangled her feet from her trousers and lay down.

  After a few minutes Thulium thought of something. “Where’s the bird?” she asked. “Isn’t she supposed to be in quarantine too?”

  Wang-Mu answered quietly. “She was already checked for viruses. She poses no danger to us, and she said she didn’t care if she was in danger from local diseases here. So Jane is taking her to meet the fathertrees and the Hive Queen.”

  “That’s a violation of protocol!” said Thulium.

  It was Peter who answered this time. “When an emissary of a foreign power asks to meet famous and powerful people in your land, you take them and introduce them. Especially when another member of your own team has already flagrantly violated protocols that you agreed to.”

  “I didn’t agree to—”

  “What land, what nation, what organization do you represent?” asked Wang-Mu, her voice mild, but her question pointed.

  “I represent science,” said Thulium, the words sounding lame even to herself.

  “Then this has been a sad day for science,” said Wang-Mu.

  15

  Queen: Welcome to my home, Raven that the humans call Dog.

  Dog: You have found a way to speak directly into my mind.

  Queen: Human speech is hard for you, and for me also. This is better.

  Dog: You are not human, yet they showed me that your children labor in the fields to grow food that humans eat.

  Queen: My children eat some of the same foods, and the pequeninos eat almost all of them.

  Dog: Are you then beasts of burden for the humans to exploit?

  Queen: When we choose to be. But when they took you to see my child
ren in the fields, did you see any humans as overseers?

  Dog: So they are not slaves.

  Queen: Not belonging to humans.

  Dog: Then who?

  Queen: They belong to me. They, in some ways, are me, or part of me. If I died, they would die, too. I believe that means they are not free individuals in the way that you are free.

  Dog: Can I and my people trust these humans?

  Queen: You will have to define “these” and “humans.” Humans are fundamentally untrustworthy, and some of the most intelligent of this particular group of humans—the ones who are studying your world and now beginning to visit it—are completely untrustworthy, so far. Humans have a long developmental period. Many reach adulthood without learning how to control themselves.

  Dog: They once destroyed your entire species.

  Queen: With one obvious exception.

  Dog: And you hide your existence from most humans because they would try to destroy you again.

  Queen: We don’t know what they would do. They would all react differently, and even they are bad at predicting how they will respond to future events. So everyone is safer when only a few humans and pequeninos know that we exist.

  Dog: Is that what we must also do?

  Queen: I don’t know what you must do.

  Dog: What do you think about our chance of survival if it comes to war between these humans and us?

  Queen: These humans will not go to war with you. But if your existence becomes known, and even a few humans on other worlds believe that your world is the source of the descolada virus, they will send a fleet to blow your planet up.

  Dog: And if they did, what would you do?

  Queen: I would feed your people when Jane and Peter and Miro bring as many of you as they can to Lusitania. Then they would move you to other colony worlds that offer more opportunities for you to feed and breed.

  Dog: Why doesn’t Lusitania offer such opportunities?

  Queen: The descolada virus destroyed most of the flora and fauna of Lusitania. Only the species-pairs that it succeeded in synthesizing have survived, and these include nothing that you could eat. Only what we are growing could help you, and only because you are also from Earth originally, like the plants the humans need us to grow for them.

  Dog: This descolada virus must have been a terrible thing.

  Queen: Its devastation happened before any humans came here, and before Ender Wiggin came here to bring me out of my cocoon.

  Dog: When your people left you as their sole survivor, and marked your location in ways that only Ender Wiggin would recognize, they trusted your entire existence as a species to that one person. But he is dead.

  Queen: His aiúa lives on in Peter Wiggin.

  Dog: I don’t trust Peter Wiggin.

  Queen: He is still discovering himself. He gets better every day, partly because he is married to Si Wang-Mu and has learned to respect her.

  Dog: Can I trust his word?

  Queen: Yes.

  Dog: Do you trust his word?

  Queen: I trust Jane and Miro, Peter and Wang-Mu, Ela Ribeira, and I have high hopes for Sprout Delphiki. Hopes not so high for Thulium Delphiki. Her abilities are astounding; her maturity not impressive; and her word is very nearly worthless … so far.

  Dog: I came here hoping for answers.

  Queen: I have told you the truth, and to verify my sincerity, you can see that I live here completely at the mercy of the humans.

  Dog: How long would it take you to build a new fleet of starships that could challenge the human empire?

  Queen: Alone, it would take me twenty years. But now that I have my own Sisters on all the worlds colonized from Lusitania in the past year, if we all worked together, we could build such a fleet within three years. But what would be the purpose?

  Dog: Vengeance? We ravens have a long memory for harm and insult.

  Queen: So do humans.

  Dog: Should we submit, then?

  Queen: Treat them like equals. Negotiate rules for their presence on your planet. Set deadlines for them to leave again.

  Dog: How much information should we give them?

  Queen: All of it. If you keep secrets, they will know it. They will not trust you then. Tell all. Show all.

  Dog: Have you done that?

  Queen: Jane knows, and we trust her to know which humans to tell, and when.

  Dog: We have no Jane.

  Queen: You are Jane, to your own people. Now that we have this connection, I will never let it go.

  Dog: Across all the light-years between our worlds?

  Queen: I am bound to you by love and honor. You and I are sisters now. Call me in your mind, and I will hear you.

  —Memorandum: Transcript dictated to Jane by the Hive Queen Quoted in Demosthenes, The Civilizations of Birds

  Sprout did not want to go when Thulium decided to leave. He understood that it seemed impossible they could learn anything, with all their gear stolen, with the keas flying chaotically around them, making it hard to concentrate.

  But Sprout concentrated anyway, because he did not wish to go.

  No, it was stronger than mere desire. He refused to go.

  He refused with such firmness that it was not worth trying to discuss it with Thulium. He knew that she would carry him with her and discuss it only after the fact, and he refused to play that game.

  He liked the games the keas were playing better.

  So with all the power of his will—which he rarely asserted on the Herodotus because what was the point? Everybody always did what they wanted—with all the force that was in him he insisted on staying exactly where he was, in this meadow, on this planet, surrounded by these birds.

  Even though he felt the inward wrenching that always accompanied flying Outside and In, when it stopped, he had not moved out of his place.

  Or had he? Had she carried him Outside, and did he then come back Inside to the place of his choosing?

  Did it matter which? He was here, where he wanted to be, and Thulium was not with him, which is what he wished for, at this moment, for a little while.

  The keas were still swarming. But they immediately altered their behavior and began flying right at him, then rising up or moving left and right when they got close. Others flew over his head. It felt threatening.

  Then they started squirting their poo at him. It was white, and as soon as he saw it, the white stuff hit him wherever it had been aimed. And where they were aiming was his face, his hair, his whole head. He was blinded within moments, as loose poo dripped down from his forehead. He dared not open his eyes, because he had no idea how acidic the bird poop might be. He knew that the green stuff was fecal, from the intestines, and the white stuff and the liquid came from the kidneys. Plenty of uric acid, he imagined, though his reading had never gone very far, mostly because on the Herodotus birds were only in books and vids.

  Aware that vision plays a part in balance, Sprout knelt down in the grass so he would not fall under the onslaught. He thought of lying down and trying to wipe the stuff off his face in the grass, but he figured that calm acceptance of their abuse was a wiser strategy. If they wanted to give him a poop veneer, he would tolerate it.

  Finally he stopped hearing the fluttering of wings and feeling the impact of globs of poo. With one hand he wiped enough stuff away from his mouth that he could open it to speak, but he instantly regretted it, because some of it went right into his mouth. But he decided to tolerate that, too, and did not spit and gag or otherwise show weakness.

  “Has everyone emptied their bowels?” he asked.

  He felt a kea alight on his shoulder. “We have a few in reserve, but mostly yes.”

  “How would you recommend that I clean it off, so I can see again?” asked Sprout.

  “It has already set. The first globs were mostly uric acid. But then it was all green stuff, which dries on a base of acid like concrete.”

  “And that’s what’s in my hair?” said Sprout.

  “We
used to use that defense when we mobbed hawks and brood parasites. It would not come out of their feathers and weighed them down so they couldn’t fly. Now the brood parasites have learned to raise their own young and stay away from our nesting areas. The hawks only take mammals and reptiles and amphibians. When you load a hawk or a cowbird or a cuckoo with concrete that it can’t remove, it will never mate again because who will mate with a bird that can’t fly? Usually they end up running into something and killing themselves.”

  “So you were trying to kill me,” said Sprout.

  “That would be unwelcoming,” said the bird.

  “Are you Royal Son?” asked Sprout.

  “The Royal Mother calls me that.”

  “Will it prompt another attack if I walk in the direction that I think is toward the river, in hopes of dissolving some of this and washing it away?”

  “You may do whatever pleases you, as long as you don’t crush a flower.”

  Sprout sighed. “Since I can’t see, and there are flowers all over this meadow, I assume that I will inevitably crush a flower.”

  “Don’t birds on your world mob intruders and poo them away?” asked Royal Son. “What do you usually do?”

  “There is only one birdlike species on Lusitania, the xingadoras. Plus, at this moment, Dog. And the place where I grew up wasn’t a world at all. It was a spaceship traveling at relativistic speed, and we had no birds on board. If we got covered in something unpleasant, we bathed with soap and water. And we kept washing until it was all gone.”

  “If birds couldn’t bear space travel,” said Royal Son, “none of us would be here. There was nothing on this world that could fly when we arrived.”

  “Royal Son, will you lead me to the river? Will you warn me so I don’t crush any flowers?”

  Sprout had tried very hard all along to keep impatience and anger out of his voice, but with this plea he tried to sound especially humble, mild, unthreatening, and peaceful.