Serpent's Reach (7 page)

“Exits all covered,” Warrior breathed beside her; and then she realised where all the others had gone—majat strategy, efficient and sudden. The main corridor of the central dome lay vacant before her…what had been home. Rage hammered in her in time to her pulse.

Suddenly, far off down the wings, there was crashing and shrilling of alarms, from every point of the budding: blue. hivers were in. A domestic azi darted from cover, terrified, darted back again, up the stairs—and screamed and fell under a rush of majat down them.

Red-hivers. Raen whipped the gun to target and fired, breaking up their formation, even while blue-hive swarmed after them.

There were human cries. Doors broke open from west-wing: Ruils burst from that cover with a handful of blues on their heels. Raen left majat to majat, steadied her pistol on new targets and fired, careful shots as ever in practice, at the weapon’s limits of speed. Her eyes stayed clear. Time slowed. They fell, one after the other, young and old, perhaps not believing what they saw. Their faces were set in horror and hers in a rigid grin.

Then a baritone piping assailed her ears and the blues in all parts of the corridor signalled each other in booming panic, regrouping to signals she could not read. From east-wing came others, reds, golds, a horde of armed azi.

Raen stood and fired, coldly desperate, not seeing how to retreat. Some of the Kethiuy azi and the surviving blues attempted to rally to her, but fire cut them down and a rush of majat came over them.

Warrior fell almost at her feet, decapitated. The limbs continued to struggle, nearly taking her off her feet. Naked azi sprawled dead about her. She spun then, catching her balance, and tried to run, for there was no other hope. The blues, such as survived, were in full flight.

Something crashed down on her, crushing weight.

A second time Raen lay quietly and waited to live or die; but this time the walls were stark white and chrome, and the frightened azi who tended her kept their eyes down and said nothing.

That was well enough. There was nothing she particularly wanted to hear. She was not in Kethiuy. That told her something. Drugs hazed her senses, keeping her from wishing anything very strongly.

This continued for what seemed days. There were meals. She was fed, being unable to feed herself. She was moved, bothered for this and the other necessity. She said nothing in all this time, and from the azi there was no word.

But finally the drugs were gone, and she waked with a majat guard in the room.

Red-hive. She recognised the badges, the marks they wore for humans, who could not see their colours. Red-hive Warrior.

She knew then that she had lost, lost more than Kethiuy.

The majat gave her clothing, grey, without Colour. She put it on, and found the close feeling of it utterly strange. She sat afterward with her hands in her tap, on the edge of the bed, staring at the wall. The majat guard did not move and would not move while she did not.

There was shock attendant on regaining the human world; there were realisations of what she had lost and what she had become. She was very thin. Her limbs still hurt, although she bore scars only on her side. She held her right hand clenched in her left. feeling the beaded surface of the chitin which was her identity: Raen, Sul-sept, Meth-maren, Kontrin. They gave her grey to wear, and not her Colour. There was no way to remove the other distinction save by massive scarring. A scale lost would re-grow. She had heard of Kontrin deprived of identity, mutilated by assassins, or by Council order. That prospect frightened her, more than she was willing to show. It was all she had left to lose. She was fifteen, going on sixteen. She was mortally afraid.

It was a very long time before the call she anticipated came.

She went with the azi guards, unresisting.

They were the authority of the Family, the available heads of the twenty-seven holdings and the fifty-odd sub-grants, with their outworld branches. They wore the Colours of House and sept, and glittered with chitinous armour…ornament, little protection, for most was for right-arm only; and weapons in Council were outlawed. Old men and old women inside, although the faces did not make it evident… Raen scanned the half-circular array, the amphitheatre of Council, herself in the low center, and realised with mixed feelings that no one present wore Kethiuy blue. She saw Kahn, once the youngest in Council; at seventy-two, senior of assassin-ravaged Beln sept of the Ilit; he looked thirty. There was Moth, who showed her age most, incredibly wrinkled and fragile…going soon, the Family surmised. She was beyond her six hundredth year and her hair was completely silver and thinning. And Lian, Eldest of Family…to him Raen looked with a sudden access of hope; Lian still alive, uncle Lian, who at seven hundred had been immune from assassination perhaps because the Family grew curious how long a Kontrin could live and remain sane. Lean was one of the originals, old as the establishment of humans on Cerdin, first in Council.

And he had had friendship with Grandfather. Raen had known him from her infancy, a guest in her home, who had noticed her at Grandfather’s feet. She tried desperately now to meet his eyes, hoping that about him still gathered some power to help her; but she could not. He nodded away in his own thoughts, placid, seeming elsewhere, and simply old, as betas grew old. She stared past him at the others then, altogether out of hope.

There were Eron Thel and Yls Ren-barant, allies, some of Ruil’s friends. Sul had detested them. And there were others of that ilk. She had deepstudied the whole Council and all the Houses of greatest import to Sul Meth-maren, so that she knew every name and face and the manners and history of them: but the faces she should have seen were not there, and others wore their Colours. There were new representatives for Yalt and Then, young faces. Her skin went cold as she reckoned what must have happened throughout the Family—many, many Kethiuys, in so short a time. New men had come into power everywhere, on Cerdin and elsewhere, a new party in power, and from it only Ruil Meth-maren was missing.

Eron Thel rose, touched his microphone to activate it, looked at Council in general, sweeping the banks of seats.

“Matter before the Council,” he said, “the custody of the minor child Raen a Sul Meth-maren.”

“I am my own keeper,” Raen shouted, and Eron turned slowly to stare at her, in the silence, the consent of all the others. Of a sudden she realised in whose keeping she was intended to be, and what that keeping might be. The thought closed on her throat, making words impossible.

“That you tried to be,” Eron Thel said, his voice echoing from the speakers. “You succeeded in wiping out Ruil-sept. All perished, down to the youngest, by your action.
Child
may be a misnomer in your case; some have argued to that effect. If you held the Meth-maren House, you would have to answer for its actions; and I don’t think you’d want that, would you? Council means to consider your age. You’d be wise to remember that.”

“I am
the
Meth-maren,” she shouted back at him.

Eron looked elsewhere, signalled. Lights dimmed. Screens central to the room leapt into life. There was Kethiuy. Raen’s heart beat painfully, foreknowing in this prepared show something meant to hurt her.
I shall not
, she kept thinking,
I shall not please them
.

There was the garden, by the labs. Bodies lay in neat rows. The scene came closer, and she recognised them for the azi of Kethiuy, most merely workers, inoffensive and innocent of threat to any, face after face, all of them slaughtered and laid out for inspection, one body upon another. The line went on and on, hundreds of them, most strange to her, for she had not known all who worked the fields; but there was Lia, there were others, and those faces suddenly appearing struck at her heart. She feared they would show her the bodies of her kin next, but they should have been long cremated and beyond such indignities. She hoped that this was so.

The scene shifted to the hills. Majat swarmed everywhere, reds, greens, golds. She saw blue-hivers dead. The lens approached the very vestibule of blue-hive. There were white objects cast about the entry, eggs, their fragile wrappings torn, half-formed majat exposed to the air. Blue-hive bodies were stacked in a tangle of stilt limbs, Workers as well as warriors, and naked human limbs among them, dead azi.

Then Kethiuy again. Fire went up from it. Walls crumbled to great heat. Candletrees went up in spurts of flame.

The screen dimmed; the lights of the room brightened Raen stood still. Her face was dry, cold as the centre of her.

“You can see,” said Eron, “Meth-maren’s holding is abolished. It has no adult membership, no property, no vote.”

Raen shrugged, jaw set, not trusting her voice. This was something in which her protests meant nothing. She was Kontrin, well-versed in the techniques of assassination and the exigencies of politics; and reckoned well her probable future in the hands of an enemy House. She had deepstudied the history of the Family. She knew the adjustments that necessarily followed a purge, knew that even elders of sensitive conscience would raise no objection now, not for so slight a cause as herself, who could not repay. She continued to focus on the empty screen, wishing a weapon in hand, one last chance, perceiving her enemies more than Ruil alone.

There was another stirring, from a quarter she had not expected. She did look. It was old Moth, who had been an ornament in Council for years, representative of little Eft-sept of the Tern, silent whatever happened, siding with any majority, sleeping through many a session.

“There has been no vote,” Moth said.

“But there was,” said Eron. “Moth, you must have been napping.” There was laughter, obedient, from all Eron’s partisans, and it had many voices.

Suddenly Eldest rose, Lian, leaning on the rail. He was not the joke that Moth was. There was quiet. “There was no vote,” he repeated. No one laughed. “Evidently, Thel, you have counted your numbers and decided a vote of the full Council would be superfluous.” Lian looked toward Raen, blear-eyed, his face working to focus. “Raen a Sul hant Meth-maren. My apologies and condolences, from the Family.”

“Sit down, Eldest,” said Eron.

The old man briefly pressed Moth’s hand, and Moth left her place and descended the steps toward the center where Raen stood. She had difficulty with her robes and the steps, and tottered as she walked. There was displeasure voiced, but no one moved to help or to stop her.

“Procedures,” Moth said over the speakers, when she had gained the floor and faced them. “There are procedures. You have not followed them.”

“I will tell you something,” said Eldest from his place above. He activated his microphone. “It’s a dangerous precedent, this destruction of a House, this…assumption of consent. I’ve lived since the fast ship came into the Reach, and I’ll tell you this: I saw early that men couldn’t live here without being corrupted.”

“Sit down,” someone shouted at him.

“The hives,” Eldest said, “had a wealth to be taken; but humanity and the hive-mind weren’t compatible. A probe came down on Cerdin; it came into red-hive possession, the crew held captive, such of them as survived.
Celia
probe. The hives gained knowledge. There was
Delia
, then, that got through. Back in human space there was talk about sterilising Cerdin before the plague could spread. But suddenly the hives changed their attitude. They wanted trade, wanted us, wanted—one ship, they said: one hive for humans, and the Reach set aside for themselves.”

There was sullen silence. Moth touched Raen’s sleeve, pressed her wrist with a soft-fleshed band. Someone else started to his feet, a Delt; Yls Ren-barant stopped him. The silence continued, deadly. Lian looked about him, uncertainly, and pursed his lips.

“We tricked them.” Lian’s voice, quavering, resumed. “We brought in human eggs and the equipment to handle them. Half a billion eggs, all ready to grow. And we set up where this building stands, and we set up our labs and we started breeding while our one ship made its trade runs and the others of us who had skill at communication developed agreements with the hives.” His voice grew stronger. “Now do you suppose, fellow Councillors, that the hives didn’t know by then what we were about? Of course they saw. But the human animal is a mystery to them, and we kept it that way. They saw a hive-structure. They saw an increasing number of young and a growing social order which well-agreed with their own pattern. We planned it that way. They still had no idea what a non-collective intelligence was, or what it could do. Just one large hive, this of ours, all one mind. They knew better, perhaps, in theory. But the pattern of their own thinking wouldn’t let them interpret what they saw.

“When they began to learn, we frightened them with our differences. Frightened them most with the concept of dying. They looked into our chemistry and understood the process, worked out a cure for old age. They had finally gained the dimmest notion, you see, of what our individuality
is
. The hives are millions of years old. Do you reckon why the majat were worried about our dying? Because among majat, there are only four persons…red, green, gold, and blue. Those are their units of individuality. These
persons
have worked out how to deal with each other over millions of years. They’re accustomed to stability, to memory, to eternity. How could they deal with a series of short-lived humans? So they cured death…for some of us, for those of us fortunate enough to be born Kontrin. The beta generations, the product of our cargo of eggs…they go on dying at the human rate, but we live forever. Economic ruin, if there were many of us. So even we Kontrin kill each other off from time to time. The majat used to find that shocking.

“But now things will change, won’t they? You’ve gotten red-hive Warriors to kill Kontrin; blue-hive has admitted a human. Things change. Now the majat have taken another vast leap of understanding. And one of the four entities which has lived on Cerdin for millions of years—is on the verge of extinction. Not beyond recall: majat have more respect for life than we do, after their fashion. But you persuaded them to kill an immortal intelligence, knowingly. Several of them. And one day you may live to see the reward of that. Thanks to majat science, some of you may live to see it.