Last Shadow (9781250252135) Read online

  “They all seemed to have excellent aim.”

  “The keas don’t let really smart ones like Royal Son rule over them, but when there’s a game afoot, they’ll join in, and follow the rules that a smart one lays out for them. And remember, even stupid keas are really, really smart.”

  “Only one ‘really’ was needed,” said Royal Son.

  “So humans did not create the talking ravens or the talking keas. But we recognized that they were people, just as the Yachachiyruna and the Folk are people. We agreed to share this world. After two centuries in a spaceship, even with the habitat, the Folk were uncomfortable in open air, under the sky, but the ravens and keas loved it. They belonged here on the surface. So did the Yachachiyruna, during warm seasons. So we, too, make nests in the forest canopy, and raise our children in the sky. But we build no buildings. That’s for the miners, the ones who burrow deep into the stone.”

  “Where do you grow your food?” asked Sprout. “We couldn’t see any evidence of agriculture, at least not from space.”

  “You walked through the meadows, didn’t you?” asked Ruqyaq. “What kinds of grasses do you think those are? No one mows them except at harvest time. In swamps we grow rice, and the rice reseeds itself. The wheat and maize do the same, and though the rodents eat many of the seeds, their fewmets fertilize the ground. We encourage beans to grow between harvests, to replenish the nitrogen in the soil. The whole world is a vast farm, which we harvest at need. So you saw our farms from space. It looked like nature to you.”

  “Those are all the questions I feel I should ask, and you have answered them beyond my best hopes.”

  “I told true stories.”

  “As did I.”

  “Yet here we are, and you choose to end our conversation?”

  “The other questions I have are scientific. Genetic, specifically. Here on the surface, do you Yachachiyruna study genetics?”

  “We study everything that the Folk study, and during winter we use all their machines, and design new ones for them. We’re still the best engineers, and we go down and solve problems for them all year. So when it’s time for you to study our genes, and the genes of the birds and our stingless bees, it is as likely to be a Yachachi who works with you as not. But I know the real barrier. The first message we sent you was of a huge and peculiar gene, a virus of sorts. That was because we thought you might be the people who sent it to us, so we sent our version back to you, to say, Are you the people who made this? And your answers are still inscrutable.”

  “As are your messages,” said Sprout. “In the Box up there, some of them think you created that virus. On our world, it caused horrible devastation and destroyed the biota of a planet. So if you sent it, then you must be an enemy.”

  “We met that virus when we got here, but it didn’t come on us as a disease, and it destroyed nothing. We found a complex though primitive biosphere on Nest, and we have worked carefully to try to avoid extinguishing any of the native species. But that virus didn’t kill anything.”

  “What do you call it?” asked Sprout.

  “The Recorder,” said Ruqyaq.

  Sprout was baffled. “Why?”

  Ruqyaq looked at him as if he were crazy. “Because that’s what it does. It records.”

  “Records what?” asked Sprout.

  “Genomes,” said Ruqyaq. “What did you think it did?”

  Sprout sat there in silence, thinking, trying to make sense of how they could think of the descolada as such a harmless thing, when it had seemed like the end of the human species if it once got free from Lusitania.

  “I think,” said Sprout, “that it’s time for me to—”

  “Go home,” said Royal Son.

  “Report to your people,” said Ruqyaq. “But I tell you first: You are always welcome here, Sprout. You are invited.”

  “By the keas as well?” asked Sprout.

  Royal Son made a couple of trilling sounds. “We regard you as our friend.”

  As soon as he said that, several keas flew into the clearing and dropped pieces of Sprout’s stolen gear at his feet. But they brought none of Thulium’s things.

  Sprout said, “Thank you, my friends.” He gathered up the gear and stuffed it into his pockets as best he could. It certainly wasn’t everything he had brought, but it included the most expensive things. “I hope I’ll be able to come back. This has been an amazing day, but your kindness has been—”

  “Flattery flattery,” said Ruqyaq. “Yes, we’re amazing, you’re amazing, now let’s not be like people who can’t leave the party because they stand at the door saying good-bye forever. It’s time for you to go, so … go.”

  Ruqyaq looked at him as if he expected Sprout to simply disappear.

  And Sprout thought of Q-Bay, and how much he wanted to go there and tell everybody what he had learned.

  Just like that, Ruqyaq wasn’t there. Royal Son was gone, the trees were gone. Sprout stood in Q-Bay, with daylight streaming through the windows of the lab. Nobody was working in the lab. Hadn’t they left anyone to watch for him?

  Oh, right. They didn’t know that Sprout had somehow learned to transport himself. Or else maybe Jane simply read his mind and knew he wanted to come home, and she transported him. At the moment he didn’t care which, because he hadn’t aspired to the power anyway.

  So maybe Jane knew he was back, and maybe she didn’t. Sprout looked for the phone, found it, and dialed the number of the mess hall.

  “We’re not serving until five-thirty,” said the head cook.

  “This is Sprout. Brussels Delphiki. I don’t think anybody knows I’m back, but I’m in the quarantine bay. Would you let somebody know I’m here?”

  “Oh, so I have to cook dinner and run errands for lazy children?”

  “You know I can’t leave Q-Bay, and there’s nobody else here. I wouldn’t call you if I had any other choice.”

  “You mean this is the only phone number that you know?”

  “I never need to call anybody else because they’re always in my face.”

  She laughed. “I’ll run your errand, space boy.”

  She hung up before Sprout could thank her. He lay down on an examining table and relaxed, hoping to catch a few winks before the tests and debriefing began.

  17

  Thulium: Surely you’re not taking Sprout’s story seriously.

  Jane: Is he known to be an extravagant liar?

  Thulium: Not till now. But a man with ape arms but straight legs?

  Jane: Remember that I have access to ancient databases. There was a trading clan called Quispe, and the individual ship called Ark disappeared during the time of the First or Second Formic War. The family that commanded that ship was named Huapaya. They included speakers of Quechua and Aymara.

  Thulium: But anyone who knows anything about linguistics knows that Quechua and Aymara aren’t even from the same language family. They all shared the Andean habitat, and their phonemes and morphemes influenced each other, but the languages were not mutually intelligible.

  Jane: Thank you for providing me with a little lesson in linguistics.

  Thulium: Sprout got that wrong.

  Jane: Sprout has not accessed the databases that include Quispe, Huapaya, Ark, the fact that they were Andean natives, and when the ship disappeared. So he got all those correct by chance?

  Thulium: The whole story, the birds, the tree-man—

  Jane: Yachachi. Engineer.

  Thulium: Cannot be taken seriously.

  Jane: So all this time when we’ve taken you very seriously, including my teaching you how to transport yourself and others Outside and In, that was appropriate. But taking Sprout seriously, that is simply impossible.

  Thulium: The situations are not at all alike.

  Jane: Let’s both ponder that statement for a while, not forgetting the points that Sprout got right, before we talk again.

  —Transcript: Thulium Delphiki and Jane Ribeira as cited in Demosthenes, “The Delphiki Orpha
ns”

  Sprout sat in Q-Bay, reading an old book from pre-war days. It had been intended as a cutting-edge explanation of deep physics and deep astronomy, and now it was almost laughable. Yet somehow the humans of that era managed to get into space, and when the Formics came, they were able to start from that shaky scientific platform and reach near-lightspeed starflight and create the ansible in only a few years—months, really.

  So it doesn’t take accurate or complete information, thought Sprout, to be able to make giant leaps in technology that move right past the theory—or contradict it completely. It just takes an open, inventive mind.

  He wanted to say this to Ruqyaq. But Sprout didn’t know if he’d ever see Ruqyaq again.

  Of course, if he really did have the power or the skill or whatever it was to make the Outside-In leap, then nobody could stop him from going back.

  Ruqyaq and his people didn’t need a human child to look after. Sprout could not possibly keep up with them in the trees. And the people who lived underground had not invited him because he had never met any of them. So he would not go back on his own. He would have to wait for the Ribeiras and the Delphikis to believe him.

  I have never done anything to earn their distrust. They know from Peter’s and Wang-Mu’s vids that the keas really do steal everything. Why should they doubt that they did the same to me?

  But Sprout knew that there was nothing rational about his story. They really encased his head in so much poop that hardened into cement? Peeing on it made it soluble again? He held his breath three minutes in the water?—well, they all knew he could do that—and then the whole thing about Ruqyaq. His body, and then his story. Everyone except Thulium had listened in silence, and when he concluded, Jane merely thanked him. And that was all.

  Thulium should have realized that Ruqyaq’s history completely vindicated her idea that the descolada did not originate on Nest. But she seemed most skeptical.

  And he was still in quarantine.

  There was no reason now for quarantine to take so long. If somebody was going to catch a dire disease, it would have shown up already. A brief blood scan should do the job, along with a visual inspection of the epidermis, mouth, nostrils, and ears, to make sure there were no unfelt injuries or attached parasites.

  Who imposed the quarantine rules? Who had the authority to change them? Was there any kind of government in this project? Was it Jane? Or Ela? Miro? It couldn’t be Peter, even if he really was the same aiúa as Ender Wiggin.

  Or was it the Hive Queen? Or the consensus of the fathertrees?

  Sprout had done nothing wrong. He was on the surface of Nest because Thulium insisted on taking him there. He stayed, because he thought she was giving up too easily, and the events proved him right. He didn’t deserve to be dropped from the project for his initiative, his …

  Nobody has dropped me from anything, Sprout told himself. Nobody has told me anything, so why assume the worst?

  Surely they’re not listening to anything Thulium says. In retrospect, her snide comments during his account sounded like resentment—he had succeeded where she failed; he had stayed when she gave up. That would be intolerable to Thulium, of course. Sprout would smooth it over with her, once he got out of here.

  The lights in the lab came on.

  It was the middle of the night on Lusitania. Who would be arriving?

  Sprout set down his library book on the table beside his chair, and stood up.

  Jane was at the door. She was unlocking it. But she wasn’t alone. Miro was to be expected, but also Peter and Wang-Mu, Thulium, and from the Box, Ela and Quara. Plus three Formic workers and three pequeninos. It was like a diplomatic conference. Or a panel of judges.

  “Come on out, Sprout,” said Jane. “We’re changing the rules. Quarantine shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes in the future.”

  Sprout said nothing. Nor did he move toward the door.

  “Come on out of there, Sprout.” He knew this second voice, because it was so strange and memorable. His eyes quickly found the raven on Wang-Mu’s shoulder.

  “Are you Dog?” asked Sprout.

  “Arf,” said Dog. “Woof.”

  “Did you meet the Hive Queen?” asked Sprout.

  “I hear you met a Yachachi,” said Dog.

  Thulium gave a little bark of a laugh.

  “I’m the Dog, Thulium,” said Dog. “No barking, please.”

  “Thulium thinks that Sprout has exaggerated his experiences after she left him on Nest,” said Jane. “She’s a skeptic.”

  “Or a heckler,” said Peter.

  Dog hopped onto Jane’s shoulder. “Why should there be any doubt?” she asked. “Look at the vids.”

  “The keas took Sprout’s recording devices within thirty seconds of arriving on Nest,” said Wang-Mu.

  “Of course,” said Dog. “But I asked Royal Son to make sure all recording devices were immediately delivered to the Yachachiyruna, and they should see to it that everything was recorded.”

  “Where is the gear that Sprout brought back with him?” asked Peter.

  One of the pequeninos handed him several plastic bags. He reached into one and removed the cam. In a few moments, it was plugged into a computer, while Wang-Mu set it up to display on the largest holopad in the room.

  There stood Sprout, with bright-colored keas bombarding him with bird feces. At first he was embarrassed, but Sprout quickly became fascinated with the way the birds performed accurate bombing runs without ever making it look like they were organized in any way. They came from everywhere, at seemingly random intervals of a second or less. And there was Sprout, sinking to his knees, then wiping the sludge away from his mouth so he could speak.

  “Did I see some of that go into your mouth, Sprout?” asked Ela.

  “You don’t want them to add it to the menu here,” said Sprout softly.

  A few people chuckled.

  “You can skip past this, it’s not interesting,” said Sprout, trying to avoid the whole business of discovering he couldn’t scrub his face clean, and then stripping off his clothes and playing dead, and all that stuff.

  “It’s extremely interesting,” said Ela.

  Was she in charge of this gathering? Was Ela head of the project after all, even though she was far from the smartest person working on it? Well, he only assumed that, because she wasn’t a leguminid. She had come up with the altered descolada that saved Lusitania and, along with it, the whole human species.

  So Sprout rocked his head back and watched every moment of the vidrec through his nearly-closed eyes, the way he watched scary scenes in movies when he was younger. Whoever was holding the camera did a good job of pointing it at everything that mattered, including the keas laying out his clothes on the grass before he returned to them. They made a game of it, of course, and the whole process looked disorganized, including the birds that got inside his underwear and pushed it into his trousers, while other keas held his waistband open. Chaos, chaos, and then the keas all flew off and the clothes were laid out perfectly, as if Sprout had only just been spirited away, leaving the clothes behind.

  “Gotta admire those keas,” said Miro.

  “Pesky little jerks,” said Dog.

  “Like I said,” Miro affirmed.

  Sprout watched himself get dressed, clumsily because the clothing kept sticking to his wet skin.

  Then the vidrec got confusing, because the person holding it was apparently still filming while brachiating through the trees. A couple of times an out-of-focus shape appeared at the very top of the holodisplay, and it was Wang-Mu who said, “The Yachachi must be operating the cam with his foot, while he swings using his arms.”

  “It’s giving me a headache,” said Thulium.

  “You don’t have to watch,” said Jane, utterly without sympathy in her voice.

  Oh, thought Sprout. Jane is angry with Thulium. Well, that’s better. It meant that not everybody shared Thulium’s point of view.

  And then there were slig
ht gasps, murmurs, even chuckles when Ruqyaq came down and Royal Son made the introductions. Wang-Mu paused the playback while most of the people in the room walked around the holodisplay to see from every angle. Of course, the vid was taken in only two dimensions, but the playback extrapolated from all the footage, and from every view, to create a reasonably accurate replica of angles that the cam hadn’t actually picked up at the time.

  Wang-Mu resumed the playback, and they listened to Sprout’s account of the leguminids and Anton’s Key, and then Ruqyaq’s story of the Folk and the Yachachiyruna. The playback ended just before the time when keas brought back most of Sprout’s gear—including the cam that made this vidrec.

  “Thank you,” said Sprout to Dog.

  Dog bobbed his head. A nod? Probably.

  “If I had known this vidrec existed,” said Ela, “I would not have called such a meeting.”

  “It wouldn’t have been necessary if we had simply believed Brussels Delphiki in the first place,” said Jane. “He’s known to be a truthteller, and I had independent corroboration of the existence of the trading family and the mining ship that Ruqyaq told him about.”

  “Better to have the whole thing,” said Ela. “It’s hard to imagine what too much evidence would look like.”

  Thulium spoke up. “You look at it every day. It’s the whole universe, in every detail, through every moment of time.”

  She was greeted with dead silence.

  Sprout couldn’t have that. “Hey,” he said. “That was funny.”

  “Not very,” said Peter.

  “That was Thulium saying that she’s sorry she doubted me,” said Sprout. “And now this is me saying that if I hadn’t lived through it, I don’t think I would have believed it either.”

  Sprout felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Quara—the Ribeiras’ difficult child. Well, Sprout knew that Thulium wasn’t the Delphikis’ difficult child—that would be the twins, individually and in the aggregate. But he still felt moved that Quara, who had often behaved like Thulium in the past, was the one who acknowledged his forgiveness of Thulium.