Rift (69 page)

A small crowd gathered, while Reeve shouted, “You promised! Tell them, Nerys, it was our bargain!”

As the woman interpreted to the gathered orthong, they stared at her. Then the crowd parted as one of their number came forward. The woman and this orthong talked in sign for a moment. Then she told Reeve, “Salidifor says your people killed orthong.
That
is a trade, as well.”

Reeve looked into the orthong’s hideous face.
“You’ll be remembered for how you handled this! The stories will live, and humans will hate you.”

“It’s a mercy. They’re wounded,” Nerys interpreted for Salidifor.

Again, Reeve spoke directly to the orthong leader: “No, that’s not how humans think! Start thinking like a human!”

The woman smirked, and spoke in a lower voice: “That was the wrong thing to say, Calder.”

Mitya noticed then that Val Cody was lying wounded nearby. He went to her side and wiped the matted hair away from her head wound. The creatures turned to watch him, and Mitya thought they would kill him now that he had drawn their attention. But the scene was utterly silent and still. Val Cody stirred, her face sheathed in pain.

Then the lead orthong said something in sign. Mitya didn’t know what he said, but he figured it must have been in Reeve’s favor, because gradually the rest of the orthong dispersed, leaving Mitya and Cody alone and leaving the other wounded where they lay.

Then Reeve and Tenzin Tsamchoe and the Stationers who survived began moving among their fallen friends, giving what help they could. The orthong watched impassively, neither helping nor hindering.

Beneath them all, the ground gently rumbled.

7

Reeve felt for a pulse, but Koichi was gone, dead of blood loss from a deep gash in his chest.

He added his name to the list of the dead: Koichi Hayenga, Oran Lowe, Liam Roarke, Bertram Hess, Gudrun Anderson, Eva Kingrey, Donald Cress, Mai Shinn, Rolf Tielsen, Gerry Brandt, Yoo Lee, Dava Freiberg. Gabriel Bonhert. And Marie Dussault. Others would be added over the next few hours.

But the list was longer than this, much longer. Cyrus
Calder. Grame Lauterbach, Carlise O’Donnell, Kurt Falani, Lin Pao, Brit Nunally, Dana Hart, Geoff Lederhouser, Amee Ryan. And Tina Valejo, the most lost of all, frozen solid and by now perhaps acquired by a family of comets.…

Some of the dead Reeve had killed with his own hand. But he hadn’t killed the man he came to kill. Yet Gabriel Bonhert was dead, and all his plans with him. If revenge was part of Reeve’s compulsion, then he should feel satisfied that he had killed Marie Dussault. But all he felt for that grand moment was ashes in his mouth.

And in the back of everyone’s mind was the fate of the one mole Marie had managed to launch, the device that could yet shatter all their lives. But for that, they could only wait.

In the hours since the battle, Tenzin Tsamchoe had taken charge while the orthong troop stood at the edges of the camp, leaving the humans to clean up as best they might. Tsamchoe was the only officer still on his feet, and Reeve thought him a good choice in any case to lead what was left of the Stationer expedition. Tsamchoe had at his side, acting as aide, young Mitya, one of the few people Tsamchoe completely trusted now, after all that had happened and all that had been revealed.

Reeve sat down next to Koichi’s body and rested his head on his knees. When he looked up again, Nerys was standing there.

“It’s over,” she said.

“Is it?”

She sat down next to him, her face grimy but her eyes keen. “Yes. The mole failed. It’s destroyed.”

Reeve snapped alert. “How do you know?”

“Salidifor said.”

“How does he know?”

She shrugged. “He said it failed in the first hour.” Turning to face the great vent behind them, she said:
“It’s probably spit back up in that flow of lava over there.”

His chest rose, and he inhaled. And then again. “By the Lady,” he said in a low voice. “So we’re pardoned after all.”

“What?”

“Pardoned. For our folly.”

An indulgent smile flitted over her face. “A funny thing to say.”

“Maybe. Depends on your perspective.” He was scratching slowly at the ground with his right hand, forming five grooves in the slaggy loam. He thought of Loon, and missed her.

They sat for a long while amid the ruins of the camp, gazing at the stream of molten rock. It was recycling the stuff of the world, mixing upper and lower, the surface of things and the heart of things. After a time he asked Nerys: “Do you think that the world—the natural world—has a memory?”

She took a long drink from her canteen before answering. “No, not like us. But it carries the past forward somehow, doesn’t it? I don’t know if it gets as far as forgiveness.”

Reeve nodded, staring into drifts of fog studded with glowing drops of sulfuric acid. “It remembers the old air and soil, I think. The spores and the seeds and the eggs, all those things that were buried. They’re working their way to the surface. That’s a kind of memory.”

Nerys shrugged. “From that standpoint, it’s the
only
kind.” She handed him the canteen, and he took a long drink.

They sat gazing at the vent as though at an oracle within whose exhalations some meaning might be found.

After several minutes, Nerys spoke again: “I don’t know how much it weighs on you. But I want you to
know I don’t blame you anymore. For picking me. If it matters.”

He looked into her face and acknowledged, “It matters. I have enough death to answer for.”

“Think of it as life,” she said.
“I
do.” She nodded at him, a kind of leave-taking. Then she walked off to join a lone orthong who stood on a low rise in the distance, waiting for her.

18
 

1

Day seventy-five
. They buried them in the valley. Stationers who never expected to rest in the ground were lowered one by one into their graves. Reeve felt that when his time came, he would count it an honor to sleep in Lithia’s bosom, a truer rest than the Station’s ponics farm or Tina’s endless drift.

He’d helped to dig the graves and to lower the dead. When it was Marie’s turn, he bid her farewell with a cold heart. Some, like Kalid, might forgive betrayal. Reeve figured in his own case it would take time. He would grow toward it. For now, there was other work at hand: farewells, and then the claiming of his due from the orthong.

The farewells were short. The orthong airship waited, and there was not much to say. Tenzin Tsamchoe shook hands with him, and then Mitya did the same.

“Some still want to join the
Quo Vadis,”
Tsamchoe said.

“Salidifor says he’ll speak to the ship,” Reeve replied. “I’m sorry. I don’t think we’re in on the discussion.”

“I’m staying,” Mitya piped in.

“Me, too,” Reeve said. He smiled at the lad, and got a grin in return.

The other Stationers disdained to see him off. He walked toward the waiting ship, sorry for the gulf between his Station companions and him. He thought that might change in the days to come, when they were offered something in return for what they had lost. If Divoranon came through on her part of the bargain, then the next generation of humans on Lithia would live free of indigo and domes and breathers. They would be different from their parents, and this might create a division among them, but nothing came without a cost. The price he wouldn’t pay was Loon’s price—sterility. His people had to continue their line. Even altered, it was still a human line.

He had spent seventy days with that new human, with Loon. If he could love her so fiercely, he told himself, it must prove she was human, or so close that it made no difference. He’d seen her yearn for home and belonging, treasure her friendship with Spar, and accept and love a clumsy Stationer—even if it didn’t last. It was more than enough to set his mind at ease, and to help him wish the
Quo Vadis
Godspeed in its search for a better place. To Reeve, there could be no better place.

But now he was eager to visit Divoranon and to see how much orthong understood the concept of keeping their word. It nagged at him, that betrayal might not be just the province of humans.

2