Last Shadow (9781250252135) Read online

  “You’re not used to asking animals for favors, are you?” asked Royal Son.

  “Are you animals?” asked Sprout. “I thought you were people.”

  “To humans we’re animals.”

  “Not after you’ve made it clear that you can speak and understand.”

  “Why did your sister leave?” asked Royal Son.

  “She’s my cousin—her father is my mother’s brother.”

  “I know what a cousin is,” said Royal Son. “Why did she—”

  “I don’t know for sure,” said Sprout, “because we didn’t have a chance to converse before she left. But I assume she left because she realized she couldn’t accomplish anything against the resistance of your people.”

  “Not because she was afraid of us?”

  “She had a clear idea of what she wanted to accomplish here. You took away all our gear, so she would be unable to do any of it.”

  “We did the same thing to Wang-Mu and Peter,” said Royal Son.

  “No you didn’t,” said Sprout.

  “Well, no, because Wang-Mu started speaking to us like people before we got to that stage. Plus the Raven Council hadn’t decided anything yet.”

  “Now they have decided. What, that you can kill me?”

  “Of course not. We know you have powers far beyond anything we can do or even imagine.”

  “My head is encased in bird poo cement.”

  “I will lead you to the river by making this call.” Royal Son made two squawks. “And if I make this sound”—he made a high chirrup—“stop and go around the flower.”

  “Thank you,” said Sprout.

  “Don’t thank me yet,” said Royal Son. “I’m sure you’ll fall flat on your face at least nine times before you reach the river.”

  The total number of falls turned out to be two, because Royal Son did a good job of leading him, and he stepped carefully enough not to have his weight on his leading foot, so he usually didn’t trip on any obstructions. When he got to the river, he peeled off his shoes and his clothing down to the skin and waded into the water.

  “Be careful of the crocodiles,” said Royal Son.

  “Your humans would have to be amazingly stupid to introduce crocodiles before there were any grazing animals for them to eat. Especially if they’re only just introducing flowering plants.”

  Royal Son made a noise that might have been kea laughter. “We had flowering plants right from the beginning. The whole world is covered with flowering plants.”

  Sprout wanted to demand, Then what’s all this rigmarole about not stepping on flowers? But he already knew enough about keas to know that this was a game, and he was the butt of the joke, and if he got angry it would only make the joke funnier.

  He used sand from near the bank of the river to try to scrub the stuff off his face, especially around his eyes. When he rose up out of the water, it felt like he hadn’t accomplished a thing.

  “Very good job,” said Royal Son. “Now your concrete facemask is covered with brown mud and yellow sand.”

  “Will I be blind forever?” asked Sprout.

  “That depends,” said Royal Son.

  “So there is a way to dissolve this … stuff?”

  “Oddly enough, the solution is simple. Pure uric acid will dissolve the layer of poop, and then you can wash the white stuff away with a bit of scrubbing.”

  “In other words, if you and your friends pee on my head and face, I can get the cement off me.”

  “Don’t open your eyes too soon,” said Royal Son. “This stuff will be pretty strong.”

  Again with the fluttering of wings, the close passages. Again with impacts against every part of his head, but especially his face. He did not try to open his eyes. He simply stood in water up to his waist, thinking about crocodiles to keep his mind off the fact that his whole head was now dripping.

  “Don’t try to speak,” said Royal Son. “You don’t want any of this in your mouth.”

  Sprout saw no reason to argue with Royal Son’s assumption.

  After what felt like an hour, but was probably less than ten minutes, Royal Son landed on his shoulder. “While your head is still wet, you should go under the water and try that scrubbing thing again.”

  Without a word, Sprout sank into the water. Judging from the flurry of a wing near his ear, he figured Royal Son had been taken by surprise at the suddenness of Sprout’s response. Maybe Royal Son even got a little wet.

  This time the scrubbing worked, though the sand on his eyelids was painful and he wondered whether his corneas might get scratched. He opened his eyes under water. The water stung, but in a few moments he was used to it. He rose up to his full height and shook himself as much like a dog as he could manage. He’d seen plenty of vids of that move, and he and the cousins had already determined that humans could only do a poor imitation of it. But he kind of hoped that some of the water would spray out and hit a kea.

  But when he wiped the water from his eyes, he saw that there wasn’t a single bird near him.

  He walked up onto the riverbank and, of course, his clothing had been taken.

  He was done with this. He walked back into the water, lay down, and floated on his stomach, with his face in the water. All the cousins had been taught to swim when they were infants on Nokonoshima. There had been nowhere to practice swimming on the Herodotus, but what they could do was immerse themselves in the larger of the two bathtubs on the ship and see how long they could hold their breath. Sprout almost always won.

  So swimming wasn’t his goal. Playing dead was the game.

  He counted heartbeats. This helped to calm him so that his oxygen use went down. He knew he was drifting with the current, but it was lazy and slow this close to the river’s mouth. And in the back of his mind was the thought: Maybe I brought myself back here. Maybe Thulium carried me Outside, and I brought myself back In where I wanted to go. Maybe I can also move myself without Thulium. Without anybody.

  Or maybe Jane was watching him somehow. She was so powerful. But he didn’t want her to save him, not yet. He still hadn’t accomplished anything except to put up with, quite literally, a lot of crap from the keas.

  He knew that his relaxed heartbeat was usually between fifty and sixty beats a minute. So when he reached 135, he figured the birds weren’t watching. He was about to roll over on his back when he felt a bird land on his head.

  “Wake up, stupid human. Birds can smell death. We know you’re not dead.”

  Could they really? He knew vultures could, but not all birds had that amazing sense of smell. Why would keas ever have evolved it? So he didn’t move. He didn’t respond in any way. His heart didn’t even beat faster.

  “Will you get out of the water if we bring you back your clothes?”

  Not enough, thought Sprout. Because it was a question, a conditional statement. If we bring you back your clothes.

  “We will bring you back your clothes,” said Royal Son. “We know how long humans can hold their breath. You’re not a sea turtle, you foolish boy. Get up and walk while the river’s still shallow.”

  Sprout was beginning to feel the oxygen deprivation with distress. Three minutes was about as long as he could usually manage, though once, when he was really working at it, he had reached four minutes. He was over three minutes now.

  So he stood up. “I was resting,” he said, as he wiped the water from his eyes and blinked them open. “I was rinsing the last of the poo and mud and sand from my eyes.”

  “You were playing a game to test how much we cared about not killing you and to see if you could get us to give you back your clothes.”

  “I got you to say you would bring me back my clothes,” said Sprout. “Now we’ll see if you keep your word.”

  “Better than you humans keep yours,” said Royal Son.

  “I have never violated my word,” said Sprout. “And I never will, as far as it is within my power.”

  “Follow me to your clothing,” said Royal Son.
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br />   Sprout half expected to find his clothes in tatters on the grass. Instead, his clothes were laid out on the grass in human shape, as if someone had lain down wearing them and then disappeared.

  Sprout lifted up the pants and found his underwear inside them, as they would be when he finished dressing. Cute game, keas. It didn’t take him long to dress—the main problem was that the day was warm enough now that instead of the river water drying off, his own sweat kept him so damp that it was hard to pull some of the clothes on. They had also apparently peed on whatever poop cement had gotten on his clothes, dissolving it, or their aim when they bombarded him was so perfect that none of it went anywhere but on his head.

  “You’re not very good at dressing yourself,” said Royal Son.

  “I’m covered with perspiration,” said Sprout. “It makes the clothing cling to my skin.”

  “Poor humans. Clothing, sweating, stuck on the ground. Your lives are hard.”

  “Thanks for making my life harder this morning,” said Sprout.

  “We thought it was important for you to have a memorable experience, so you’d always be able to say, My first friends on the planet Nest were the playful keas, who liked me so well they let me join in their games.”

  “So you call this planet ‘Nest’?”

  “Our humans called it that. We have names that mean the same thing in all our languages. So if you call it Nest, or the Nest, no one who speaks your language will misunderstand you.”

  “Better than the name we’ve been using.”

  “Which is?”

  “Descoladora.”

  “I’ve never heard that word.”

  “Lusitania was founded by colonists who spoke Brazilian Portuguese, and so they named the terrible disease that threatened to wipe them all out, ‘descolada,’ which means something like, ‘taking things apart.’ Or … better translation … ‘ungluing everything.’”

  “Why did you name our planet after the disease?” asked Royal Son.

  “Because the first transmission that came to the Box from this planet was a digital representation of the complete genome of the descolada.”

  “But we have never had such a disease in the Nest.”

  “So how did you know how to encode the trillions of bits of its genome?” asked Sprout.

  “That is a mystery,” said Royal Son.

  “It’s the mystery we have to solve,” said Sprout, “because there are those among us who believe that Nest must have been the origin of this savage, murderous disease. We know it didn’t evolve naturally—it was manufactured and then sent out to seed the galaxy with devastating plagues.”

  “So when you called us Descoladora,” said Royal Son, pronouncing the name surprisingly well, “you feared us. You thought we would infect you with murderous illnesses.”

  “We thought it might be your favorite art form, destroying and deforming the biota of other worlds.”

  “That is useful information,” said Royal Son. “Lie here on the grass—and don’t worry about the bees, their stings have been bred out of them—until I can report to others what you said.”

  Sprout took his advice, since he hadn’t gotten enough sleep the night before this expedition. But he took care that when he lay down, he didn’t have any flowers or bees under him. Because he wasn’t sure what was true and what was not.

  Sprout slept, and when he awoke with a bird walking on his chest, the sun was past noon.

  “Your skin is turning red in the sun,” said Royal Son.

  “My skin is normally dark enough that it isn’t that big a problem,” said Sprout.

  “It isn’t usually a problem because you grew up in a spaceship and you haven’t been outside much more than twenty minutes at a time,” said Royal Son.

  “Who told you that?”

  “I made observations when I went to Q-Bay,” he said. “Everybody’s always keying things into the computer, or manipulating images or data. No sunlight. You’re becoming noticeably red.”

  Sprout decided not to be needlessly defiant. He sat up, then got to his feet and walked over into the nearest shade. Royal Son came after him. “When your cousin left, why didn’t she take you?”

  “I think she meant to, but I didn’t want to go. So I stayed.”

  “Why did she leave?”

  “We didn’t discuss it, but I assume she decided that since you were resisting our visit—”

  “We were not resisting,” said Royal Son. “We were getting acquainted.”

  “You challenged her because she broke an agreement she didn’t know about.”

  “Were we incorrect?”

  “She didn’t know about the agreement because she chose not to converse with Peter Wiggin and Si Wang-Mu and find out what had been agreed to.”

  “So she chose ignorance, even though she claimed she came here to learn.”

  “She is young and impulsive,” said Sprout.

  “You are also young. We know what children look like,” said Royal Son.

  “I felt you taking genetic samples from me, and I’m sure you also took them from her. When you analyze them and compare us to other humans, I’ll explain to you all the ways that we differ from ordinary humans. So far.”

  “Just you two children?” asked Royal Son.

  “We have siblings and cousins who share our most significant genetic changes, but only Thulium and I are assigned to do research on your world.”

  “And your idea of research is to take samples without asking questions.”

  “Just like yours,” said Sprout.

  “Ah, but this is our world, and you came uninvited.”

  “I would be glad of an invitation now,” said Sprout.

  “But why would your visit have any value for us? We have gained everything we wanted to know from Peter and Royal Mother.”

  “Of course you haven’t,” said Sprout, “or why would the raven Dog have gone to Lusitania?”

  “You are very uppity for someone begging for permission to stay here.”

  “You would not have taken samples from us if you didn’t have the equipment to allow a close examination of our genomes.”

  “Would you like access to those machines?” asked Royal Son.

  “Maybe,” said Sprout. “If you think I could use them.”

  “Easier for you than for us,” said Royal Son. “You have two hands that you can use at once, even though they’re big and clumsy.”

  “Here’s an easy question, Royal Son. When someone on this planet sent a radio message to our Box in the sky, containing code to assemble ridiculously complex genetic molecules, was that done by ravens? By keas? Some other birds? Or by humans?”

  “I don’t know about any transmissions,” said Royal Son. “If birds sent them, we are not those birds.”

  “Thank you,” said Sprout.

  “For what?”

  “For answering my question immediately and, I believe, truthfully,” said Sprout.

  “I was truthful, though I have no idea how you would go about discerning the truthfulness of a kea.”

  “Neither do I,” said Sprout. “But at some level, I unconsciously made the decision to believe you. Whatever part of my mind decided that, I trust it. Of course you didn’t begin to really answer my question, but you did not attempt to conceal your misdirection, and I believe you don’t actually know about the transmissions.”

  “You do not talk like a child,” said Royal Son.

  “I would hope not,” said Sprout.

  “Of course there are humans on this planet,” said Royal Son. “But we are the inhabitants of the surface of this world, and you will only meet humans if we decide to allow it.”

  “Are the humans your prisoners?”

  “Absolutely not. But they and we respect our treaties and our boundaries.”

  “Are you breaking a treaty by telling me they exist?”

  “No, because my cousins all agreed that I should tell you.”

  Sprout looked around at the keas th
at stood in the grass. They all moved a little from time to time, and every now and then one would flutter upward and drop right back down. If there was a pattern to it, Sprout hadn’t detected it.

  “Was this decided when I was in the water?” asked Sprout. “Because when I was on dry land, I never heard any kind of discussion.”

  “You don’t speak or understand any of our languages,” said Royal Son. “So you did not even know that we were speaking.”

  Sprout realized that he had never introduced himself, mostly because nobody was listening. “My name is Brussels Delphiki, but everyone calls me Sprout.”

  “If that is true, then your name is Sprout.”

  “Wang-Mu and Peter called you Royal Son. Does that make it your name?”

  “It does in your language,” said Royal Son.

  “You said that if we wanted to know something about your history on this planet, we should ask you first.”

  “Not me. I’m language, not history.”

  “By ‘you’ I meant ‘whoever among the kea or the ravens is prepared to tell me.’”

  “Nobody is prepared to tell you, because we had no idea anyone was coming, till that flying box appeared in the sky.”

  “Here are the things that we need to know, as scientists,” said Sprout. “We need to know how the humans got here, where they came from, when they left Earth’s star system, when they arrived here, and which of the plants and animals here came from Earth. Then, if there have been genetic alterations—”

  Royal Son squawked. “These are good questions,” he said, when Sprout fell silent. “I will find out if anyone wants to answer them, and if it is allowed.”

  “So I go back to sleep again?” asked Sprout.

  “Not this time. It will be easier if you come with me. Walking, not swimming or floating or playing dead, if you please.”

  16

  In Tochoji, capital of Nokonoshima, a meeting was called by the three Delphiki spouses, Yuuto, Mayumi, and Airi. Their spouses were invited. Carlotta and Andrew came at the appointed time.

  Mayumi: You came to persuade us to leave our homes, our work, our families, and come with you to a tiny colony world so that we can be parents after all to the children you stole from us eleven years ago. All three of us have said no. Yet you are still here.