Last Shadow (9781250252135) Read online

  Miro nodded.

  “The builders of the descolada virus are virus makers. So are the humans of this world—but only because it was forced on them. They already had a much higher technology than the pequeninos had when the descolada reached them. The humans fought it off, and in the process they developed their genetic science to a much higher level than they had conceived of before. Just as humans learned a lot of new physics from the Formic invasion.”

  Miro nodded yet again.

  “So the so-called Descolares that you located aren’t the source at all, they’re fellow victims. But now you have at least two confirmed points of infection to start from in trying to locate the real planet of origin.”

  “Yes, Thulium, you are what we thought you were.”

  “I’m sure the cousins have already come up with the same idea,” said Thulium.

  “They have not,” said Miro. “So I may come back to you with an offer. Separate you and Sprout from the rest of your family, show you everything, but then keep you from rejoining your family until we have some idea of whether it will be safe for them to learn what you would find out.”

  “Sprout and I are children and we still need our parents.” Thulium said this wryly, because they both knew that while she wanted her mother, she could do just fine without having Sergeant close by all the time.

  “So, stay here and don’t find out,” said Miro. “But we’re not sharing our deepest secrets with people we can’t trust.”

  That was how Thulium spent her time while the others all went to meet the pequeninos.

  She didn’t want to be here when they came back, either ridiculing the experience or ridiculing her for missing it. Or both.

  So after giving Miro time to go off to wherever he went to when he wasn’t explaining why the Delphiki family were not even a tiny bit of an improvement on the human species, Thulium went out the back door of their … house?

  Apartment building? Tenement? Prison? Holding facility? Halfway house? Words she had learned, words she had read, but which she had no idea how to employ properly in the real world.

  She wandered between rows of buildings, not really hurrying because, being alone, she didn’t have to try to match her gait to that of someone taller. Also, if somebody challenged her and demanded to know where she was going, when she answered, “Nowhere,” it would be believed, because she didn’t seem to be in a hurry.

  Where she was going was the perimeter fence. She knew that Miro had once suffered terrible brain damage from crossing over the fence separating humans from pequeninos, but whether the disruptor field was still operating or not, she didn’t know. Still, as she drew nearer to the fence—in an area that fronted on no paths on either side of the barrier—she knew she was going to cross.

  The disruptor field had not been designed to punish people who passed all the way through it, because nobody’s conscious thought processes were supposed to be able to last long enough to do that. You were supposed to fall down unconscious from the extreme agony of the field, ten meters or five meters or whatever away from the fence.

  But now the pequeninos were friends, right? Jane had transported them right along with humans to the new colony worlds, so that they could all survive, as species at least, if the Congress fleet had gone ahead and blasted the planet. After all of that, would any disruptor field still be in place to keep humans and pequeninos apart?

  Then again, the humans who were still here on Lusitania were the ones who either didn’t want to go, even to save their lives, or those who were given low priority in the migration, so they had the insult of knowing that the Ribeira family had judged them and found them … not unworthy. Just useless. Low priority.

  Why am I trying to evaluate the response of these people to being left out of the migration? I haven’t met any of them yet. They haven’t met me, either. And by my own choice, I haven’t even met the pequeninos, mostly because, if I’m telling myself the truth, I assumed that we’d be getting the guided tour, the Potemkin Village version of human/pequenino relations.

  And she only suspected this because of reading about similar tourist experiences in history. Recreations of historic sites, or show towns where nothing was real. She assumed that she would be lied to. And why did she assume this?

  Because she was in a place where the Delphiki family saw only each other, Miro, Jane, and a handful of Lusitanians who had surely been vetted and then agreed to remain confined in the prison compound with the Delphikis.

  At that point, she was close enough to the fence for the disruptor field to kick in.

  It was an immediate nightmare. All kinds of images started flashing into her mind, like the visions of hypnagogia, where everything feels clear and real and yet makes no sense at all. The visions popped up and she recognized all of them, either from real experiences, from her reading, her study of documentary and historical vids, or from past dreams.

  Yet she also never lost sight of the fence ahead of her and the grassy ground between her and the fence. She never misplaced a foot or twisted her ankle. She did not stumble. She did not veer away from the fence. And there was no physical pain at all.

  Now her hands were on the chain links of the fence. It wasn’t so awfully tall, even though she was small. And because her feet were small, she could fit her shoes nicely into the chain links and scramble up the fence like a gibbon racing up into the trees of—Borneo? Sumatra? Considering that she would probably never visit Earth, it was kind of sad she had already devoted so much of her life to watching footage of creatures who were probably not getting transplanted to colony worlds, but might now be protected and preserved on a much-less-crowded Earth.

  Those thoughts helped her hold onto her sanity all the way over the fence, down the other side, and out into the land beyond the zone of the disruptor field.

  It’s still here, to signal humans that they’re too close—but they must have toned it way down, Thulium decided, because they didn’t want anyone else to be damaged the way Miro had been damaged.

  Of course, I’m assuming that because I’m unaware of any brain damage, I must not have suffered any.

  Her memory seemed to be fine. She started singing aloud a foolish children’s song Aunt Carlotta had sung to her—she said that her namesake, the nun that first identified the Giant’s exceptional abilities, had taught the song to him, and he to her. Or maybe the song came from Aunt Carlotta’s mother, the legendary Petra Arkanian Delphiki, who stayed on Earth with the normal children. The language was neither Catalan nor Armenian. Nor English, the mother tongue of the Common speech. So Thulium had no idea what the words meant. But she remembered them anyway, and the tune.

  She sang the song aloud, and she couldn’t detect any difficulty in her enunciation of words and production of sounds. She was still walking smoothly and easily. There was no detectable brain damage. Home free.

  She kept walking straight away from the fence until she had crested a low rise. She knew that once she was on the other side, she was short enough that nobody in the compound would be able to see her. Then she turned west, heading toward the main gate, but angling off toward the south so that nobody—and no cameras—at the gate would be able to see her.

  And what do I expect to accomplish on this expedition of mine? She had no ready answer, and yet she must have something in mind, because she had been following this plan resolutely.

  I’m off to see the piggies, but not the official ones. Not the ones prepped to impress the leguminids with the wonderful cooperation between species.

  And she was hoping to get some idea of what the great secret was. The thing that always set off a sequence of lies and evasions and subject changes.

  Here’s what she found. First, on the surface of a planet, the land just keeps going and going and going. Over every hill, there’s still more scenery, and pretty much the same scenery, so she had no idea if she could possibly find her way back. For a while, at least, turning north would lead her back to the fence, a little farther along; b
ut after she walked long enough, tending west as well as south, she lost confidence in that. What if she turned north and never found anything? Just kept walking and walking until she reached a river too wide to cross. Or an ocean. Maybe she should have studied a map.

  And she needed to use a toilet.

  She stopped and considered turning back. Or turning north, which amounted to the same thing. But she was aware that in this long hike, the ground had mostly tended downward; returning would be a long, long climb. Or if that was an illusion, it felt to her as if it would be a climb, and that was discouragement enough, considering that she still hadn’t accomplished any of her purposes yet.

  As for that pressure in her bowel, she knew from long experience that she could go for hours after that feeling first came, before she had to interrupt what she was doing—work, study, a game, a conversation—and use the toilet.

  Toilets were weird here anyway. Paper? They used paper to clean up? They couldn’t waste space on the Herodotus for toilet paper. Both toilets on the ship would automatically wash and then sterilize the user. Here you had to get your hands involved. She washed and washed afterward but never really felt clean. Why didn’t they bring civilization with them to this place? The Herodotus was built more than three thousand years before. If it had toilets that automatically washed you, why didn’t they install those on Lusitania? They actually had to manufacture the toilet paper here, and Sprout said that he figured it was most of the paper they produced. “They’ve got nothing more important to put on paper,” he said, and got a laugh from the others.

  She’d turn back in a few hours.

  They probably know I’m gone, she thought. They watched me leave on their hidden cameras. There are cameras everywhere out here, too, or they have camera drones flying just high enough that I can’t hear them, so whatever I do and wherever I go, I’ll be in a place they’ve decided is harmless enough. They’re allowing me to explore so I’ll have the illusion of freedom and conclude that they have nothing to hide.

  But I will only conclude that they’re much better at hiding it than I had supposed.

  And then she realized that the patch of lower grass she had just passed over was actually a well-traveled road. Hover cars didn’t leave ruts the way wheels did, but they kept the grass from growing tall. She stepped back into that roadway and looked northeast and southwest along it and realized, yes, definitely, this was a maintained roadway. Lots of vehicles came through here.

  That’s why this area was maintained as grassland, though the pequeninos’ territory was forested land. Thulium could see trees on hills in the distant northwest, but here the land was not farmed, not grazed on, just maintained as grassland with a road running across it.

  She followed the road. It was smooth going. It was leading nowhere, and came from nowhere, but that couldn’t be true because roads weren’t built without a purpose. Paths weren’t worn through lawns unless people frequently walked that way.

  If they’re watching me, either they expected me to find this road and follow it, in which case I’ll find nothing interesting, or they’re already mobilizing whoever is supposed to “happen” to come along and “offer” me a ride back to the prison. Holding cell. Concentration camp.

  Nobody came. So it must be safe. A waste of time.

  She was tired enough now—and thirsty enough—to regret her decision to start hiking with no preparation whatsoever. No supplies. And she had come to realize that holding it for hours at a time was only possible when she was sitting. Walking apparently stimulated the actions of the bowel. And her body was telling her, now is the time. It’s going to happen now.

  In her whole life, she had never made any trip that wasn’t within easy reach of clean drinking water, a toilet, and a bed. Only when they carried out compulsory exercises outside the Herodotus, so they’d be used to spacesuit discipline, was she ever far enough from a toilet to have to hold it for a while. Even then, she could always let fly inside the suit, though it would be her job to clean it afterward, a great disincentive to void her bladder or bowel while still outside the ship.

  For half a million years humans had managed to poo without toilets. Even on wide-open grassland with nowhere to hide. They were probably completely open about it, too—what was the shame in getting rid of whatever the digestive system had determined wasn’t food? If there were drones watching her, what would they see? She could manage the job as well as any Neanderthal, she was sure.

  What about here? There were no trees to hide behind. No vegetation but grass. But a low rise of ground with a declivity on the other side would shield her. It was as close to privacy as she could get.

  When she had relieved herself, she pulled grass and wadded it up and discovered that grass blades made very unreliable toilet paper, so that she had to “wash” her hands afterward by rubbing them on stands of grass that still had enough dew on them to help with cleaning.

  No soap. Nothing sanitary about this. Far worse than toilet paper.

  She had to fight the impulse to wipe her hands on her clothes. After enough scrubbing with damp grass, her hands looked clean, but could she rely on appearances? The last thing she needed was to come back home with her clothes covered in poo stains. I should have waited till I got back! she silently screamed at herself, shaking her hands as if the air could do the final scrubbing.

  Yet she could not have walked another ten steps without letting go anyway. How did primitive humans deal with this? Their hands got filthy, they infected each other, and life expectancy was low.

  The road took her, at last, to a river. A lazy, meandering river. And along the far shore, embankments of earth, natural ones, not artificial, where the river in flood stage must have carved away the face of the hill.

  Thulium was down at the riverbank almost at once, putting her hands in the water. The shore was sandy here, so she scrubbed her hands repeatedly with sand and then rinsed them off. She used the fingernails of one hand to scrape under the nails of the other.

  She wanted to get right down in the water and scrub her backside, too, because she couldn’t be sure it was really clean, but while she squatted there, considering a way to get in the water without getting her clothes wet, she found herself looking at an apparent cave in the face of the hill just beyond the other shore. She saw the shape of a person walking upright, a person whose appearance made her stop washing and retreat a few steps from the water’s edge, back into the grass, hoping she had not been observed.

  There were no pequeninos here. But now that she knew what she was looking for, she could see that for kilometers downstream, there were fields of grain and orchards of fruit and nut trees—or so she assumed, because they were in tidy rows and hadn’t grown too high. And working among the trees, and weeding or scything through the fields, and pushing wagons and wheelbarrows or bearing burdens on their back, there were hundreds of six-limbed, large-headed creatures a little bit taller than she was. Instantly she recognized them from all the historical records and depictions of the Formics.

  As secrets go, this is a good one, Thulium thought. The first Xenocide wasn’t complete. The Formics had not been utterly exterminated from the universe.

  It was too coincidental to imagine that Formics had independently colonized this world before humans ever got here. Impossible to think that their existence would have gone unnoticed or unreported by the first colonists or, for that matter, by the pequeninos.

  No, someone had brought the Formics here. And thinking back on all that had been explained in the holy book of the speakers for the dead, The Hive Queen, Thulium immediately realized that whoever wrote that book must have been able to communicate with an actual hive queen. He had known what he was talking about. His account was a truthful account of what he had learned from that hive queen. It was data, not fancy. And he, or someone else, had carried her here to start a new colony.

  If The Hive Queen was accurate, then she had completely repented of her initial assaults on Earth, on the millions of people
slaughtered as the worker Formics defoliated the land in order to prepare it for plants from a different biological system. The hive queen had only charitable intent. Or so she claimed, and obviously somebody had believed her enough to allow her to establish herself here.

  Were there hive queens and Formics on all the colony ships that left here? Were there three species represented on every one of them?

  The times when people had fallen silent, changed the subject, or denied what they had just said—they all made sense now. Maybe the majority of Lusitanian humans didn’t know, but it was a sure thing that Miro and Jane and all the others doing the science here on Lusitania knew what they were doing, what they were hiding.

  It was a good idea to keep it a secret, Thulium recognized. The invading fleet from Congress had been turned away because Ela Ribeira and her team had created a countervirus that allowed the descolada to continue to shape reproductive patterns among native Lusitanian life-forms, while blocking it from infecting any new species and forcing them to adapt to its demands or die. Even with the recolada making the descolada noncontagious, the Starways Congress had imposed an indefinite quarantine on Lusitania.

  But if that fleet had known that the nightmare enemy destroyed by Ender the Xenocide in the Third Formic War was still alive after all, Thulium didn’t think she was making a wild guess when she concluded that Lusitania would have been obliterated right on schedule.

  Thulium and the cousins had grown up reading human literature from every settled world, and while the pequeninos were regarded as somewhere between disgusting and cute—like capybaras or iguanas—there was no human society where the Formics were not still depicted as nightmare creatures.

  The Formics Thulium could see from where she was were exactly like the scariest depictions of them. The six limbs looked wrong, the faces looked evil and voracious. They were all engaged in agricultural labor, working hard on their tasks, carrying no apparent weapons beyond their own claws and mandibles, but Thulium had to exert effort to stay silent and not whimper out loud and then leap up and run back the way she came.