Engineering Infinity (39 page)

“Except that one dare not
breathe,” she added, sadly.

On the shore of the largest ice
sheet, the Lake of Heaven, the odd couple and Patrice disembarked. The Ki-anna
led the way to a great low arch of rock-embedded ice. The Green Belts had
stayed in the ship.

Everything was livid mist.

“We’re going under An-lalhar Lake
alone?”

“The Green Belts’ll be on call.
It’s not their jurisdiction down there. It’s a precious enclave where the Ki
and the An are stubbornly dying together.” Bhvaaan peered at him. “It’s not our
jurisdiction either, Messer Ferringhi. If we meet with violence we can protect
you, but that’s after the event and it might not save your life. The people
under the Lake don’t have a lot to lose and their mood is volatile. Bear that
in mind.”

“I could have had an escort they’d
respect.”

“You’re better off with us.”

They descended the tunnel. The
light never grew less; on the contrary, it grew brighter. When they emerged,
the Heaven Lake was above them: a mass of blue-white radiance, indigo shadowed,
shot through with rainbow refractions. It was extraordinarily beautiful. It
seemed impossible that the ice had captured so much light from the poisoned
smog. Far off, in the centre of the glacial depression, geothermal vents made a
glowing, spiderweb pattern of fire and snowy steam. Patrice checked his telltales,
and eagerly began to release his helmet. The Shet dropped a gauntleted fist on
his arm.

“Don’t do it, child. Look at your
rads
.”

“A moment won’t kill me. I want
to
feel
KiAn -”

The odd couple, hidden in their
gear, seemed to look at him strangely.

“Maybe later,” said the Ki-anna,
soothingly. “It’s safer in the Grottos, where your sister was headed.”

“How do we get there?”

“We walk,” rumbled Bhvaaan. “No
vehicles. There’s not much growing but it’s still a sacred park. Let your suit
do the work; keep up your fluids.”

“Thanks, I know how to handle a
hard shell.”

They walked in file. The
desolation, the ruined beauty that had been revered by both ‘races,’ caught at
Patrice’s heart. His helmet display counted rads, paces, heart rate: counted
down the metres. Thirty kilometres to the place where Lione had last been seen
alive.

“Which faction mined the Lake of
Heaven parkland?”

“To our knowledge? Nobody did,
child.”

It was a question he’d asked over
and over, long ago when he thought he could get answers. Now he asked and didn’t
care. He followed the Shet, the Ki-anna behind him. His pace was steady, yet
the display said his body was pumping adrenalin; not from fear, he knew, but in
the grip of intense excitement. He sucked on glucose and tried to calm himself.

As the radiance above them
dimmed, they reached the Grotto domain. Rugged rocky pillars seemed to hold up
the roof of ice, widely spaced at first, clustering towards a centre that could
not be seen. There was a Ki community, surviving in rad-proofed modules. The
Ki-anna went inside. Patrice and the Shet waited, in the darkening blighted
landscape. She emerged after an hour or so.

“We can’t go on without guides,
and we can’t have guides until tomorrow. At the earliest. They have to think it
over.”

“They weren’t expecting us?”

“They were. They know all about
it, but they may have had fresh instructions. They’re in full communication
with the castle: there’s some sophisticated kit in there. We’ll just have to
wait.”

“Do they remember Lione?”
demanded Patrice. “I have transaid, I want to talk to someone.”

“Not now. I’ll ask tomorrow.”

“Can we sleep indoors?” asked the
Shet.

“No.”

The Shet and the Ki-anna made
camp in the ruins of the former village, using their suits to clear ground and
construct a shelter. Patrice moved over to a heap of boulders where he’d
noticed patches of lichen. He had fragments of Lione’s incense in the sleeve
pocket of his inner, in a First Aid pouch. The police were fully occupied:
furtively he opened the arm of his hardshell, and fished the pouch out. He was
right, it was the same -

Lione had stood here. The incense
was not a gift, she had gathered it. She had been
standing
right here
. His need was irresistible. He released
his face-plate, stripped his gauntlets, rubbed away quarantine film.

KiAn rushed in on him, cold and
harsh in his throat, intoxicating -

“What is that?”

The Ki-anna was behind him. “A
lichen sample,” said Patrice, caught out. “Or that’s what I’d call it at home.
It was in my sister’s room, in the An Castle. Look, they’re the same!”

“Not quite,” said the Ki-anna. “Yours
is a cultivated variety.”

He thought she’d be angry, maybe
accuse him of concealing evidence. To his astonishment she took his bared hand,
and bowed over it until her cheek brushed the vulnerable inner skin of his
wrist. Her touch was a huge shock, sweet and profoundly sexual. She made him
dizzy.

This can’t be
happening
, he thought.
I’m here for Lione -

“I don’t know your name.”

“We don’t do that,” she
whispered.

“I felt, I can’t describe it, the
moment I met you -”

“I’d better keep this. You must
get your gloves and helmet back on.”

“But I want
KiAn
-”

Gently, she let go of his hand. “You’ve
had enough.”

The shelter was a snug fit.
Sealed inside, they shared rations and drank fresh water they’d brought from the
Habitat. They would sleep in their suits, for warmth and security. Patrice lay
down at once, to escape their questions and to be alone with his confusion. He
was here for Lione, he was here to
join
Lione. How
could he and the Ki-anna suddenly feel this way?

“Were you getting romantic, with
Patrice, over by those rocks?” asked Bhvaaan. “Sniffing his pheromones?”

“No,” said the Ki-anna, grimly. “Something
else.”

She showed him the First Aid
pouch and its contents.

“Mighty Void!”

“He
says
it was in the room Lione used, in the castle.”

“I don’t think so! We took that
cabin apart.” The Shet’s delicates unfolded from his club of a fist. He turned
the clear pouch around, probing her find with sensitive tentacles. “So
that’s
how, so
that’s
how -”

“So that’s how the cookie was
crumbled,” agreed the Ki-anna.

“What do we do, Chief? Abort
this, and run away very quickly?”

“Not without back-up. If we run,
and they have heavy weaponry, we’re at their mercy. I see what it looks like,
but we should show no alarm.

“I
have
had thoughts about him,” she murmured, looking at the dark outline of Patrice
Ferringhi. “Don’t know why. It’s something in his eyes.”

“Thaap’s the way it starts,” said
the Shet. “Thoughts. Then wondering if anything can come of them. They say
sentient bipeds are attracted to each other like... like brothers and sisters,
long separated. Well, I’ll talk to the Greenies. And you and I had better not
sleep.”

The suit was a house the shape of
her body. She sat in it, wondering about sexual pleasure: pleasure with
Patrice
. What would it be like? She had only one strange
comparison, but that didn’t frighten her... What Roaaat Bhvaaan offered was far
more disturbing.

She glimpsed the abyss, and fell
into oblivion.

Patrice dreamed he was in a strolling
crowd, among bronze and purple trees, with branches that swayed in the breeze.
He knew where he was, he was in the KiAn Orientation, a virtual reality. But
there was something sinister going on, the crowd pressed too close, the
beautiful trees hid what he ought to see. Then Lione came running up and
bit
him.

He yelled, and shook her off.

She came back and bit his thigh,
but now he was in the dark, cold and sore. Lione was gone, he was being hunted
by fierce hungry animals -

Suddenly he knew he was not
asleep.

He was completely naked.
Where was his suit? Where was he?

He had no idea. The air was
freezing, the darkness almost complete. He stumbled towards a gleam ahead, and
entered a rocky cave. There was ice underfoot, icy stalactites hanging down. A
lamp burned incense-scented oil, set on the ground next to a heap of something
-

That’s a body
,
he thought. He went over and knelt down. It was a human body, freeze-dried. She
was curled on her side, turned away from him, but he knew he’d found Lione. She
was naked too.

Why was she
naked?

He lifted the lamp and saw where
flesh had been cut away, not by teeth, as in his dream, but by sharp knives.
Lione had been butchered. He tried to turn her: the body moved all of a piece.
Her face was recognisable, smooth and calm in death, the eyes sunken, the skin
like cured leather. Was she
smiling
? Oh, Lione -

But why am I
naked?
, he thought.
Who brought me here?

The Ki entered the cave, and
surrounded Patrice and his sister. They had brought more lights. One of them
was carrying, reverently, a flattened spherical object, dull grey-green, the
size of Patrice’s fist. It had a seam around the centre, a bevelled cap.
That’s a vapor mine
, he thought, shaken by an explosion of
understanding. Then the An came. The Ki made no attempt to interfere with the
banquet. They were here to witness. Patrice screamed. He fought the knives with
his bare hands, kicked out with his bare feet. The An, outraged, kept yelling
at him in scraps of English to
keep still, be easy Blue
,
you want this, what’s wrong with you?

The Ki-anna and the Shet had
ditched their hard shells, to search the narrow passages. They arrived armed
but badly outnumbered, and they couldn’t get near Patrice. “
I was the Earth In Heaven
!” shouted the Chief of Police. “
I say that flesh is not sacred, not yours to take. Let the
stranger go
!”

She held the fanatics at bay,
uncertain because of her former status, until the Green Belts joined the party.
Luckily Bhvaaan had summoned them, before he and the Ki-anna followed Patrice
into that drugged sleep.

Patrice’s injuries were not
dangerous. As soon as he was allowed he signed himself out of medical care. He
had to talk to the police again. He met the odd couple in the same bare
interview room as before.

“I’m sorry, I need to withdraw my
statement. I can’t press charges.”

If the next of kin didn’t press
charges, KiAn law made it difficult for Interplanetary Affairs to prosecute. He
knew that, but he had no choice.

“I realise the tablet I found in
Lione’s room was planted on me. I know her words, if some of them were
genuinely hers, had been rearranged to fool me into accepting atavism. It doesn’t
matter. My sister
wanted
to die that way. She gave
herself, her body. It was a ritual sacrifice, for peace. She was my twin, I can’t
explain, I have to respect her wishes.”

“A beautiful, consensual ritual,”
remarked the Shet. “Yaap. That’s what the cannibal die-hards always say. But if
you scratch any of these halfway ‘respectable’ atavists, such as our Ruling An
here -”

“You find the meat-packing
industry,” said the Ki-anna.

Patrice heard the blinkered, Speranza
mindset.

“My sister was
willing
.”

“I believe she was.” To his
confusion, the Ki-anna reached out, took his injured hand and held his wrist,
where the blood ran, to her face. The same sweet, intimate gesture as on KiAn. “So
are you, a little. It’ll wear off.”

She drew back, and placed an
evidence bag, containing his First Aid pouch and the scraps of lichen, on the
table.

“In English, the common name of
this herb, or lichen, would be ‘Willingness.’ It grows naturally only under the
Lake of Heaven. Long ago it was known as a powerful aphrodisiac: the labwork
kind has another use. It’s given to a child chosen to be the Ki-anna, which
means sold to the An as living meat. It’s a refined form of cannibalism,
practiced in my region. A drugged child, a willing victim, with a strong
resistance to infection and trauma, is eaten alive, by degrees. If one of these
children survives to adulthood, they are free, the debt is paid.

The Ki-anna showed her teeth. “I
made it, as you see; but I haven’t forgotten that scent. When I smelled your
flesh, under the Lake, I knew you’d been treated for butchery - and I
understood. They drugged Lione until she was delirious with joy to be eaten,
and they sent her to the atavist fanatics under
An-lalhar
.
Then they tried the same trick on you.”

Bhvaaan tapped the casefile
tablet with his delicates. “Your sister died too quickly, that was the problem.”

“What - ?”

“We couldn’t prove it, but we
knew they’d killed Lione, Messer Ferringhi. We could even show, thanks to the
Chief here, who was pulling the strings, how they got the prohibited ordnance
into the Grottos. Your sister fell into a trap. She had to get under the Heaven
Lake and that suited the atavists just fine. It would have been a powerful
message. A Speranza scientist ritually eaten, then consumed by the very air of
KiAn -”

“Controlled annihilation,”
whispered Patrice. “That’s what I
saw
, in the cave.
Something they would understand -”

“Thap was the idea. The atavists
are planning to bring back the meat factories, once their planet has an
atmosphere again. Your sister was going to help them: except something didn’t
work out. You were right about the tropo sampling: there’s also stringent
military activity monitoring. If a mine had gone off under the Lake, we’d know.
If a human-sized body had been atomised, there’d have been a spike. So we knew
the ‘consummation’ hadn’t happened, and we couldn’t figure it out. We think we
know the answer now: she died too quickly. She had to be vaporised alive, a
dead body can’t be
willing
. But she wasn’t a Ki, and
they hit an artery or something.”