Last Shadow (9781250252135) Page 7

  The road existed because the Formics were trading with the humans of Lusitania. In fact, it seemed very likely to Thulium that it was this agricultural project that was providing supplies to help the new colonies survive until their own agriculture could supply their needs.

  Jane was probably sending big boxes loaded with food and supplies. Probably including toilet paper. Keeping all the colonies alive until Formic queens could establish large agricultural colonies.

  Diligent unpaid labor. Slaves. Except that each worker, according to The Hive Queen, had little mind of its own. Instead, the hope and desire of their hearts was to accomplish whatever task the mother-brain set for them. Unthinking slaves never revolted or sabotaged or struck; they did their work. And if it came to war, they regarded themselves as expendable and spent their lives cheaply in defense of the hive queen.

  There was a slight rustle in the grass behind her. “You wish to meet queen?” said a voice that was obviously not equipped with human speech apparatus. It was a grinding sound, a whisper with pain in it, and the consonants and vowels were badly formed. But still intelligible.

  She tried to remain calm as she turned to face the creature. What could she say that would not antagonize anybody? “I don’t want to bother her,” said Thulium. “I got here by accident. I think I took too long a walk. Please apologize to her for my intrusion. It looks as if everyone is doing excellent work.”

  “We grow food for whole worlds,” said the Formic worker.

  So her guess about these fields and orchards supplying the colony worlds must be correct. “Thank you for that,” said Thulium. “And now I must be going.”

  “Queen say, come visit any time, Thulium Delphiki. You always glad welcome here.”

  The fact that this terrifying creature knew her name was too much. Thulium stood abruptly, turned, and walked briskly back along the road. After a very short time, she broke into a run. Tired and footsore as she was, she ran faster than she would have thought herself capable of.

  After a little while at an unsustainable speed, she stopped and set out due north, hoping by that move to evade pursuit along the road and to reach humans, or at least pequeninos, sooner rather than later. She was only a short-legged child; she couldn’t have gone so very far, could she?

  If it comes to war with the inhabitants of Descoladora, can the Hive Queen build war ships and weapons enough? Can she spawn soldiers enough, to conquer this most dangerous enemy?

  No, Thulium rebuked herself. Fool! Haven’t you already demonstrated to yourself, to Miro, that Descoladora cannot possibly be the original source of the descolada virus?

  All is well. There will be no war. Thulium calmed herself, repeating that like a mantra as she walked. No need for killing. We just need communication to build a bridge.

  But when we find the original source of that hideous, evil gene-altering virus, then will we unleash the hordes of the Hive Queen to wipe out that terrible enemy?

  The Hive Queen knows my name. She wants me to visit again. “Always glad welcome here.”

  Either the Ribeiras didn’t have any serious surveillance after all and did not know she had crossed over the fence, or they knew exactly where she had gone and wanted her to go there. So should she try to get back home over the fence again, and slip in undetected after being missing for enough hours that it was mid-afternoon already? Or should she go to the main gate and present herself to whoever was watching it and say, “Well, I’m back.”

  She crested a hill, the first one with a few trees on it, and saw at once that three mammalian creatures with somewhat piglike snouts and articulated hands and feet were clinging to the trunks of trees, looking down on her.

  “Greetings Thulium Delphiki, daughter of Cincinnatus and friend of Miro,” one of them called out to her.

  She did not obey her first impulse, which was to run. Instead she asked, “Am I on a good path to the main gate?”

  “You’re way far west of the gate. Go north-northeast from here, and you’ll find a path among the trees. Follow it.”

  “What if I don’t find the path?” asked Thulium.

  “Then you’re either stupid or blind,” said the pequenino who talked. “The path is right there.” He pointed, and now she could see that there was a path. “It’s the road to the gate. Many feet made that path.” Then he grimaced and, perhaps, laughed, if she interpreted correctly the noises he was making.

  “You’re right,” she said cheerfully. “It’s a very plain path to see.”

  Without betraying any of her terror at having met her first pequeninos, she casually walked to the beginning of the path, wondering if these trees were the gravemarkers of their friends or ancestors.

  “Always turn right when choosing!” the talking pequenino shouted after her. “The trees watch you. You’ll be safe!”

  She reached the main gate while there was still plenty of light in the sky. Miro and Jane were there to meet her. “Well,” said Jane, “for not being in the mood for an expedition today, you’ve certainly covered a lot of ground.”

  “I’m sorry that some poor pequenino had to run ahead with the news of my arrival,” said Thulium.

  “Don’t be silly, child,” said Jane. “I’m in constant contact with the Hive Queen, and the fathertrees told me of your easy progress back to the gate.”

  “No drones watching from overhead?” asked Thulium.

  “Oh, we have drones we can deploy,” said Miro, “for when a child gets lost somewhere outside the ken of the pequeninos or the Hive Queen. But they know who you are and so we knew you were never in danger.”

  “Except the danger of discovering your great secret,” said Thulium.

  “The Hive Queen? Not much of a secret anymore,” said Miro.

  “You have bigger secrets than that?” asked Thulium.

  “Probably not bigger from your perspective. But we thought you’d enjoy discovering it first and then telling your family.”

  Thulium was offended. “Why do you think I would tell my family?”

  “Why wouldn’t you?” asked Miro.

  “Because my father would start planning an invasion of the Formics, and my brothers would begin training to carry it out.”

  “They’d be torn to bits in moments,” said Miro. “So I hope that they don’t try something as foolish as that.”

  “They’d assume they could invade a bunch of peaceful farmers,” said Thulium.

  “Every one of those peaceful farmers is also a ruthless and highly-skilled warrior,” said Miro. “If the queen herself remembers warfare—and she does—all her workers are already possessed of all the skills she has learned.”

  “So she’s a dangerous war machine,” said Thulium.

  “Yes,” said Miro. “That’s why it was so hard to kill them all, back in the war of Ender Wiggin, Julian Delphiki, Petra Arkanian, and the jeesh.”

  “And you allowed this warlike species to coexist here with humans and pequeninos?” asked Thulium.

  “So you are your father’s daughter,” said Jane, perhaps a bit sadly. “Yes, we allowed her a homeland and a chance to survive as a species. And I can assure you that no matter how ruthless and efficient she is in war, she did lose all her wars with humans. Once our warlike species was established here, adding her and her children was not an increase in the average warlikeness of the inhabitants of Lusitania.”

  “I’m not like my father,” said Thulium. “I may think of war, but I have no intention of waging it.”

  Jane raised an eyebrow, and Miro chuckled.

  “Offensive war,” said Thulium. “Of course I’d fight to protect my family.”

  “As would the Hive Queen,” said Jane. “As would the pequeninos. They, too, are a warlike species. Every forest on this planet represents a terrible battlefield; every tree rose up from a fallen warrior’s corpse.”

  “They seem so … cute,” said Thulium.

  “One of them could rip your arms and legs from their sockets very quickly,” said Miro. �
�They’re amazingly strong. Yet they’re also sweet and smart and cooperative. Just don’t try to take one home as a pet.”

  “Speaking of home,” said Thulium. “I’ve had no food or water since breakfast.”

  “Poor dear,” said Jane. “Next time you decide to sneak over the fence, think ahead and bring provisions. At least a few liters of water.”

  “And a flashlight,” added Miro, “if you go too far to get back before dark.”

  The gate was already standing open. Miro beckoned her to pass through.

  “I take it the disruptor field isn’t active in the gate area?” asked Thulium.

  Jane laughed. “It wouldn’t be much of a gate if it were.”

  “I’m just glad you turned the disruptor field way down,” said Thulium, “or I couldn’t have gotten through it at all.”

  After she passed through the gate, she could hear Jane ask Miro quietly, “The disruptor field has lower settings?”

  She didn’t hear Miro’s answer, and she didn’t want to turn around to see if body language revealed it. Probably Jane meant her to hear her question, perhaps as a continuation of her disinformation campaign. Or perhaps it was true that she had somehow passed through the same disruptor field that had caused Miro permanent brain damage when he went through.

  What would it mean, if she could get through the full-on disruptor field with no symptoms worse than hallucinations and confusion?

  No, the disruptor field had to have been on a very low setting, and Jane made that remark so that Thulium would hear it and waste time trying to make sense of it.

  The gate closed behind her. Floodlights began to come on, because dusk did not last long here.

  “May I hold your hand, Thulium?” asked Miro. His right hand was already reaching for her left.

  She pulled her hand away. “I’m not going to run off.”

  “I don’t intend to grip your hand tightly enough to prevent you from doing so,” said Miro. “But I worried about you, and still worry about you, and you still look like a child to me, even though when I talk to you I think I’m dealing with a professor who is not pleased with my lack of progress in the class.”

  Thulium liked Miro. She thought he was the Lusitanian most likely to tell her the truth. But she also knew her hands were filthy and quite possibly infectious. She wasn’t going to touch anybody until she and soap had spent a lot of time together.

  So she put him off with words, keeping her hands folded in front of her. “You think physical contact will enhance our relationship,” said Thulium.

  Miro shook his head. “You have such a way of making ordinary things seem weird.”

  “I’ve lived inside a canister all my life,” said Thulium. “Everything here on a planet’s surface is weird to me.”

  She ran on ahead, back to the building that was now her home. Fortunately, nobody was using the shower in the bathroom she preferred. She scrubbed every part of her. Then she brought her clothes into the shower and scrubbed them, too. She wasn’t sure she felt clean, but when the hot water began to turn cooler she knew she had exhausted the tank. That meant her shower had lasted as long as it was going to.

  She hung her clothes up to drip dry. Then she toweled herself and went back to her room and put on clean clothing. Her first adventure on the surface of a planet was over. She had learned far more than she expected, not only about the aliens who shared this world with humans, but also about herself, and how unprepared she was to live like an animal in the wild.

  It was a good thing that the pequeninos themselves, despite being the apex predators on this world, couldn’t digest some of the proteins in Earth’s flora and fauna. Including humans. Ancestral humans on the savannahs of Africa had to deal with skilled, powerful, hungry predators. If this walk of hers today had been in that sort of environment, they would have found her bones scattered by hyenas and vultures.

  But Lusitania was a safe place. The aliens knew her name and watched over her. They might have learned something—but really very little—about how human children handled defecation in a pinch. Or they might not have been close enough to observe her moment of surrender to the animal needs of her body.

  I refuse to be ashamed of anything, Thulium told herself. I did the right thing, refusing their tame visit to the pequeninos and wandering far enough to find the Formics. The Ribeiras and Jane could announce whatever they wanted to the family, but Thulium would say nothing. They would see that if they ever did tell her a secret, she would keep it. That if she found out something they wanted nobody to know, she would not misuse the knowledge.

  I’m an eight-year-old, thought Thulium, but not like any eight-year-old they’ve ever known.

  5

  She has started signing her journal entries “Ultima Thule,” embracing the geographical nickname her uncle Andrew gave her as a baby. She knows that she passed through a threshold when she crossed over the fence, because she felt the need to ascertain that the disruptor field was at full strength rather than toned down from the disruptor that nearly killed Miro.

  Was it a death wish that drove her into that field? Or a desire to see just how far she could go before she felt threatened? She describes hallucinations, but she was always aware that’s what they were; fear, dread, even panic, but all manageable by her iron determination. No physical effects whatsoever, and that’s the most baffling thing, because some aspects of the disruptor field were designed to affect all cells of the body simultaneously, especially the primary afferent fibers that carry pain. There should not exist any way of coming through undamaged, yet that is what she did.

  What changes did the leguminids make to their own genome, along with taming the giantism associated with Anton’s Key?

  If she and other leguminids are more robust than ordinary humans, we may not need them as much for their minds as for their ability to withstand disruptor-style assaults. There are precedents for sending young children into possible combat situations, dating back to the Second Formic War. But would their parents give consent?

  —Leda Queijocabeça, quoted in Leguminids on Lusitania

  Valentine—the real one, not Jane—assembled the leguminids who were on Lusitania for a briefing. They did it outside on a sloping lawn, so that anybody who wanted to could lie back and yet still be able to see the visual displays Valentine mounted for them from the projector beside her.

  “I didn’t make any of the displays myself,” said Valentine. “The researchers whose work I’m reporting created them.”

  “So why aren’t those researchers making the presentations themselves?” asked Lanth.

  “They’re hard at work, and coming here would distract them,” said Valentine. “My projects don’t have the same level of urgency, so I’m free to present this to you.”

  “In other words,” said Dys, “you haven’t told the real researchers that we’re here, and you don’t want anybody to know about us yet.”

  “Lanth and Dys, if you believe the information I’m going to present will be so far beneath your standards as to be worthless to you, I urge you to return indoors. If you remain with this meeting, then I ask that all questions be pertinent to the topic under discussion.”

  Sprout was amused by the exchange, especially because of the irony that what Lanth and Dys interrupted was Valentine’s explanation of how the visual aids, none of which had yet been displayed, were created by the original researchers, none of whom had yet to be named or seen. In other words, Dys and Lanth were asking questions that were precisely pertinent to the question then under discussion.

  But Sprout knew that if he expressed this thought, merely for the amusement value, it would quite possibly lead to his ejection from the meeting, and he wanted to stay here, because there was a reasonable chance that something might be revealed that would give shape to his own research projects.

  Valentine began speaking with clarity and brevity, and all the visual aids that popped up into the air upon her command were clear and to the point. She gave them
a brief recap of the history of the descolada virus since the arrival of humans on Lusitania, and on the molecular steps to first control the virus and then to de-fang it so that it would make no further adaptations.

  That’s when Sprout raised his hand. Valentine called on him. “There is no control population, so do you have any evidence that your adaptation of such a self-adapting virus has been effective, and will continue to be effective?”

  “As you said, there is no way to test,” said Valentine.

  “So, no.”

  “We have this result: It has been effective so far, and we have seen no evidence of adaptation by the descolada virus. We monitor it frequently.”

  “How frequently?” asked Sprout.

  “Twice a day, with samples from different locations,” said Valentine. “It’s an imperfect system, but this is what seemed feasible and so far, so good.”

  Sprout recognized that “so far, so good” was about the best that could be hoped for at present.

  Valentine went on to other presentations. Specifics about determining the planetary source of the descolada virus, probable or possible means of delivery of the virus to Lusitania prior to the arrival of human colonists, estimates of how long ago the virus had reconstructed every Lusitanian species that survived. There was a presentation on the digital virus information that had been transmitted from the surface of the planet they were calling Descoladora.

  That was when Thulium raised her hand and said, “Is there any chance that the descolada virus was originally transmitted digitally to Lusitania?”

  Valentine looked at her like she was crazy, as the twins both groaned at their little sister’s childish question. Valentine answered, “The pequeninos had no equipment that could receive or interpret a digital transmission.”

  But then Valentine paused and smiled. “Of course, Thulium. The fact that they made such a transmission to our ship orbiting the planet might be taken as evidence that they are not the original source of the virus.”