Last Shadow (9781250252135) Read online

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  The exhilaration of open air, open water, space to run without a treadmill, plants that grew in such profusion as to be redundant, the different smells of the air and tastes of the water, and the ability to be by oneself or at such a distance from others that they don’t bother to try to talk to you—we all reveled in these things.

  For about a week. And even before the seven days were over, some of us, at least, were spending hours a day on “our” computers (which, because Jane had easily penetrated all of our security measures, no longer felt as if they were our own), working on either the descolada problem, or whatever projects had engaged us during our voyage on the Herodotus.

  When we asked when Father and Uncle Ender and Aunt Carlotta would return from Nokonoshima, Jane only said, “When their work is done.” Miro offered a little more, though whether he was joking or conveying genuine information we cannot determine. Miro said: “Apparently your mere-human parents are not easily persuaded to abandon their home planet and come to help raise children that they do not know and quite possibly would not like.”

  That remark sent Blue into a spiral of self-doubt and worry, and I daresay had a similar effect on various others. I’m in a quandary of my own, because if our mother actually comes here, it is impossible to believe that Father will treat her decently or that the twins will admit to needing anything maternal in their lives. That means that if she comes, it will be up to me to make her feel needed and loved, and I don’t know if that’s within my abilities.

  In the meantime, I’ve finished with all the basic work on the descolada virus, up till Ela’s molecule from Outside neutralized the threat to human life. Now I’m starting in on the transcript of all communications between the Descoladora and the Box. Since everyone involved is very clever, I don’t know if the huge holes I find in their reasoning are because I’m an outsider bringing fresh eyes to the project, or I’m an arrogant leguminid who assumes that everyone else’s work is second rate, or there is data I simply don’t have yet, which will plug those holes and leave their hypotheses in working order.

  I wish I were taller, so adult humans would take me as seriously as they take each other.

  I wonder if Mother, when she comes—if she comes—will be well-educated enough to join in discussions of our work here, or if she’ll be here only for cuddling, serving meals, and joining us in doing everything we can to keep from making Father angry.

  —Ultima Thule (Thulium Delphiki, Lusitania Journal)

  On the day of the Great Expedition to Meet the Piggies, as the twins called it, Thulium found that she didn’t want to go. It wasn’t laziness or fear, it was the conviction that playing tourist would merely set her back on her serious project about human conversations with the Descolares.

  Especially because she knew she would have to build her case carefully, since everybody seemed so dead sure that the people of the planet they called Descoladora were the actual source of the original descolada virus. Thulium had evidence—or so it seemed to her—that Descoladora was merely an early victim of the descolada.

  Nobody would like her analysis. They would listen with a bias toward rejecting her ideas and finding alternative explanations. And because nobody would believe her, her manner of presentation of her theory would be all the more important, so she could get a useful portion of it spoken before she was heckled into silence, or everybody simply started to ignore her.

  It’s easier to stand alone when you know you’re right, but when all you really have are questions, standing alone is a terrifying position to be in.

  But with Sergeant for a father and the twins for siblings, standing alone had always been her default condition.

  Plus, the pequeninos terrified her. Knowing that they had only been attempting to bring their best human friends into their complex life cycle when they tortured them to death did not change the indelible memory of the images she had seen—images that Jane had forbidden Miro and Ela to conceal from the leguminids. “They have to know everything,” said Jane, “for them to discover anything.” And so Thulium had spent a good while studying the various pictures of Pipo and Libo, as well as the pequenino Human.

  Thulium was even more frightened by the fact that there was something huge that the Lusitanians were holding back from them. Some fact that was at least as important to them as the matter of the descolada.

  There were times when someone said something and then the other Lusitanians fell silent for a moment, and the subject changed at once. There were moments when Thulium or another leguminid asked a question, and the response included some generality about sentient alien species, as if there were more in existence than the pequeninos.

  When Thulium challenged them on such a point, they always looked at her like she was crazy and said, “The Hive Queens, of course. Humans have encountered exactly two sentient species. Until the Descolares.”

  But they were not talking about information garnered from The Hive Queen, the famous quasi-religious text by the Speaker for the Dead. That wasn’t science, and it was absurd that these genuine, excellent scientists would base conclusions about alien behavior on such a weak authority. They knew something more about sentient species.

  Thulium did not know if she actually wanted to discover it, but it still weighed on her that she was being left out of a significant secret.

  More than once she thought, I could have done this research better on the Herodotus. Fewer distractions, greater safety. Why couldn’t Jane have simply done a data dump and let the leguminids sort it out as we pleased—the way we had always worked?

  When Thulium suggested this to Miro, he only shook his head and smiled. “What you’re familiar with always feels safe,” he said, “even when it isn’t.”

  “How would it have been dangerous for us to work in privacy?” asked Thulium, using her softest and most demandingly reasonable voice.

  “Because your privacy was harming you and endangering all of humanity,” said Miro.

  “Says who?” asked Thulium.

  “Humans need to be part of a tribe.”

  “We already were,” said Thulium.

  “A tribe of modified people who thought they were superior to the entire human race. They used humans callously for reproduction and then discarded them. You all lived in terror of what your father would do, because he was violent and unpredictable, and he’s raising your brothers to be the same. You need a mother, and so do they, though it may be too late to overcome their destructive upbringing.”

  “What you’re really saying is that letting us develop on the Herodotus posed a threat to the species Homo sapiens.”

  “Including Homo sapiens leguminensis. Just like dog breeders, at some point you were going to have to close off your breeding population to anyone who didn’t have the identifying leguminid traits. Inbreeding is always dangerous when speciation and isolation are going on,” said Miro.

  “So you’re pretending this is all about science,” said Thulium.

  “This is all about feeling compassion and responsibility for the children and grandchildren of the great Julian Delphiki,” said Miro. “The fact that you immediately leapt to the paranoid conclusion that we mean to harm you is just one more demonstration of the mental illness that was being systematically developed on board the Herodotus.”

  “So now I’m crazy.”

  “A complete loon,” said Miro. “Just like every other human. You are all very capable intellectually, but that says nothing about your mental health.”

  “So your kidnapping us and isolating us here, that’s not imprisonment?”

  “We drafted you into a life-and-death situation where you are likely to be able to contribute greatly, considering what your parents were able to do with Anton’s Key. Too late to save Julian, but just in time to save your parents. And you. You have great skill with genetics.”

  “And we didn’t have to journey to a magical place to accomplish it,” said Thulium.

  “Exactly.”

&nb
sp; “Why aren’t you letting us meet any regular Lusitanians?”

  Miro raised his eyebrows. “Whom do you wish to meet?”

  “Let’s start with the Catholic bishop here. We see people going to mass, way over there, with high fences between us and them. Why haven’t we met any of those people?”

  “I didn’t know you were Catholic,” said Miro.

  “The people who clean our rooms and serve our food—they don’t go back to the colony at night. They have no days off. They’re imprisoned here just like us. Except I think they’re actually our guards.”

  “It seemed convenient,” said Miro.

  “No wonder Jane didn’t want you to talk when you first came to the ship,” said Thulium. “You’re a really crappy liar.”

  “I think that’s actually praise,” said Miro. “Or it would be, if I were lying.”

  “You don’t want us to meet any Lusitanians,” said Thulium. “You don’t want us up in the starship looking down on the planet, either, because of what we would see. Things that you can’t hide.”

  Miro almost said something.

  “Were you about to say that you have nothing to hide?” asked Thulium.

  “It crossed my mind,” said Miro.

  “But then you remembered that you’re a crappy liar,” said Thulium.

  “That also crossed my mind.”

  “So you do have something to hide.”

  “There are things we’re not ready to show you,” said Miro.

  “And things you aren’t ready to show the citizens of Lusitania,” said Thulium.

  “More than half the population left when the fleet from the Hundred Worlds was coming to obliterate our world,” said Miro.

  “Yes, the largest single colonial effort since the first rush to settle the abandoned Formic planets after the war,” said Thulium. “So you have a serious labor shortage now.”

  Miro shrugged. “There are some people learning new trades and crafts. We don’t have to keep as many fields and orchards in production, except for the ones that are helping supply the new colony worlds. It’s a major effort, when a nation—a smallish colony itself—starts to colonize new territories.”

  “You sent pequeninos with every colony,” said Thulium.

  “This was the only planet where they existed. We weren’t going to let them be wiped out because of human fears,” said Miro.

  “A second Xenocide would have been such a shame,” said Thulium.

  “Don’t you think so?” asked Miro.

  “You don’t want us to see what’s going on here on Lusitania,” said Thulium. “You don’t want us to see it from ground level, which is why we’re behind fences and have no freedom to roam. And you don’t want us to see it from space, which is why you brought us here to the planet’s surface, with no means of getting to our ship. Our ship, not yours, and not subject to any government authority.”

  “You think we should have had a warrant to seize it?” asked Miro.

  “Listen closer. Warrants are meaningless. We’re not subject to any government.”

  “Anyone can say that,” said Miro. “But it’s a meaningless statement when you know perfectly well that Jane can pick you up and move you wherever she wants, whenever she wants.”

  “So Jane is the government,” said Thulium.

  “When she feels like it,” said Miro. “When she finds it necessary or desirable.”

  “Why does she desire to keep us sequestered here?” asked Thulium. Again, she kept her voice quiet and artificially calm. Something she had learned to do when talking to her father.

  “Like any wise man,” said Miro, “I do not even pretend to understand the motives and purposes of the woman I love.”

  Thulium had come up against yet another wall of steel. “Fences, silences, refusals, pretenses, that’s what I run into at every turn.”

  Miro nodded. “Frustrating, isn’t it?”

  “As if you’d know.”

  “I lived inside fences, too, you know. Then I crossed one, and the disruptor field damaged me beyond calculation. I could barely speak, I moved like a cripple, until Jane took me Outside and I made a new body for myself. Not a perfect one. Just a new copy of the one I originally had. I was so good at it that I am still genetically identical to my original. Right down to the DNA, I remade myself. But I know a great deal about fences and barriers, and also about overcoming them.”

  “By a miracle.”

  “By living every day as best I could, without even imagining that a miracle might be possible. Right now, you’re here on a planetary surface. A nice place to live, with good food, interesting weather, shelter, clothing—and room to walk and run, a sky to shout into, earth and plants to plunge your hands into. You’re far more free than I was, for all that time.”

  “Were people constantly lying to you and withholding information you needed in order to accomplish your work?”

  “Nobody was lying,” said Miro, “but I still didn’t have the information.”

  “Well, poor Miro,” said Thulium. “Now that I know you had it so much harder than me, I’m not frightened or resentful at all.”

  Miro smiled. “I like you, Thulium.”

  Thulium almost said something about not caring what he liked.

  “And you like me, too, don’t you.”

  Thulium rolled her eyes.

  “I think that was a friendly eye-roll,” said Miro. “You know I’m a crappy liar, so you’ll know I’m not lying when I tell you this. I have already argued, multiple times, that we won’t be making best use of the leguminids until we share all the data with them, because none of us are fit to determine which data are relevant.”

  Thulium believed him. “So you advocate for us,” she said.

  “And most of the people on the descolada project agree with me. The main disagreement is about timing.”

  “When you’ll tell us all the things you’re concealing?” asked Thulium.

  “Which will happen when we know we can trust you. For instance, your twin brothers have jerry-rigged several listening devices which are placed in every room in this habitation. So this entire conversation will be listened to by them, and probably anybody else they want to tell.”

  Thulium blushed.

  “Come on,” said Miro. “You know Lanth and Dys. You should have known they’d go into military resistance mode immediately, starting with gathering intelligence about the enemy.”

  “Including me, apparently.”

  “At any time in your life,” said Miro, “have you ever felt that your father and brothers were not the enemy?”

  That question hung in the air, because the very asking of it was its own answer.

  “Thulium, your brothers are merely trying to figure out our secrets, just like you.”

  “I asked, openly,” said Thulium.

  “You have a different character from theirs,” said Miro. “You may assume that somebody from our team is also recording everything that gets said.”

  “So you listen in on everything?”

  “How else can we keep you safe, when your brothers plot your murder, as well as the murder of anyone and everyone else who annoys them?”

  “They’ve never hurt anybody,” said Thulium.

  “They’ve hurt you constantly, your whole life long,” said Miro.

  Again, Thulium could not think of an honest argument. “If they kill me, then I’m dead.”

  “Exactly. But we don’t want that.”

  “Why do you care?”

  “Because you are all useful tools and we still need you. The most useful tools among the cousins are you and Sprout. We are not going to let your brothers harm you. Nor will your father be allowed that option.”

  “Father loves me,” said Thulium.

  “Yes, he does,” said Miro. “So do your brothers.”

  “How can you say such contradictory things without lying?”

  “Because these things are not contradictory,” said Miro.

  Thulium
gave a low chortle. “I get it. You aren’t talking about truth to me. This is all philosophy.”

  “You say that as if you believed it to be a synonym for ‘mumbo-jumbo.’”

  “I do,” said Thulium.

  “And as for the twins,” said Miro, “Jane is probably going to send them to Nokonoshima to keep them from talking themselves into some criminal action.”

  Miro changed his posture and his attitude. He became brisk, as if he were winding up the conversation in order to leave. “Well, Thulium, this has been a most informative conversation.”

  “Not to me it hasn’t,” said Thulium.

  “I’ve confirmed several things that you only thought were true, so now you know that you’re on much firmer ground than you thought.”

  “Thanks for that,” said Thulium.

  “And I’ve talked with you as a peer, which is something else you don’t get much of,” said Miro.

  How did he know she wanted that? She had never told anybody.

  “Neither do you,” she said flippantly.

  “Right again,” said Miro. “So now I can go back and argue that we should show you and Sprout everything you need to see, while your father and Sprout’s mother and Uncle Ender are still away.”

  “We’ll tell them anything we’ve learned, as soon as they get here,” said Thulium.

  “And will your father believe you?” asked Miro.

  “That depends on how unbelievable it is,” said Thulium.

  “You don’t believe that the Descolares actually created and sent out the descolada virus?”

  Was this the purpose of this whole conversation? To build rapport, hear her complaints, and then suddenly force her to reveal something that was still only a suspicion?

  “I have no evidence,” said Thulium. “Only logic.”

  “Logic alone is terrible for proving anything,” said Miro. “But it’s a splendid tool for exposing absurdities.”

  “If a sentient species developed the use of genetic molecules as weapons and tools and communication devices,” said Thulium, “why would they digitize those molecules and transmit them to us—to you—when the only way they could possibly do harm is if you then built those molecules without isolation, so they could enter your organism?”