So Long Been Dreaming (51 page)

“But this is not a group of Spaniards with gold lust and domination in their hearts,” the Azteca says. “The League is here to save us. Is it not?” His eyes are piercing. Something has wounded him. He hates us. “The first conquistadors thought they were saving the savages back then too,” he adds. “As you mistakenly think now.”

I have nothing to say, but stand straight and return his restrained fury with a calm gaze of my own. I am a professional.

“You done then, Frederick?” Jami asks.

“I miss my true name,” the Azteca man says.

Jami sighs.

“Acolmiztli, Frederick . . . I guess it don’t make no difference what you call yourself now,” he says.

“Done,” the woman with the scissors says.

Acolmiztli stands up and takes the cherry bowl with his hair clippings in it from her.

“I’m not much of a believer,” he says, “but the old ways are specific. You must have your hair cut in a way that does not lose
tonalli
. Or you risk losing the strength of your spirit.” He takes a deep breath. “In times like these, I need all the strength I can get.”

The door slams behind him as he leaves the room.

“He’s bitter,” Paige whispers to me. They’ve been taking my lead. I’m in charge. I’m their Tai.

“Acolmiztli
very
bitter. But the League shouldn’t assume,” Jami says, looking at the door with us, “that all Azteca go be your enemy. Some go be your friend.”

“How would I know?” I snap. “We know nothing right now. All we
do
know is that the Azteca didn’t exist on this planet when it last had contact with other worlds. We know you’re in danger from the Azteca. That’s it.” I want to ask if the Azteca are ruled by aliens, who’ve bred them, but that’s a rumour, and I keep quiet as Jami explains that there are what he calls Tolteca, reformed Azteca who have spurned human sacrifice and made great changes to Azteca society in the last hundred years.

My stomach flip-flops.

“Human sacrifice?”

Jami unfolds his arms.

“Acolmiztli tells me he only sacrificed snake, bird, and butterfly. He say,” and Jami imitates Acolmiztli’s voice perfectly, “because he so loved man, Quetzalcoatl allowed only the sacrifice of snakes, birds, and butterflies. As he was opposed to the sacrifice of human flesh, the three sorcerers of Tula drove him out of the city. The people of Tenochtitlan did not follow Quetzalcoatl. Instead, they followed the war-god Huitzilopochtli or Xipe-Totec: the flayed god. Then the fifth sun was destroyed and we lived in the sixth and it became a time of change.”

It sends shivers down my spine.

“You said you had communications equipment.” I fold my arms. The shivering continues. “We’d like to use it now.”

I shiver again, my knees weak. Jami catches me under my arms as I drop to my knees.

“What’s happening?” I’m disoriented; the walls of the room seem to bend in on themselves.

“Remember how I tell you you should have read Wells?” Jami says. “Come on.” He helps me over to a wooden bench in the corner of the room and opens a cupboard. I vaguely recognize the device behind the wooden doors. It looks like a museum piece. But it responds to a wave of my hand and my voice.

Static is my only reply. There is accusation in my angry stare, but Jami gestures at the device.

“Try again. You feeling rough.”

Sweat drips from my forehead, the shivers continue to wrack my body. This time I find a carrier signal and send a voice request up. Archaic. But they reply.

“Who is this? Identify.”

I do, giving personal ID codes and answering questions until the voice on the other side is satisfied.

“We give nothing away by saying we’re doing a retreat,” it says. “All ground assaults have been infected with some sort of virus. We’re losing this battle. We have your touchdown coordinates. Be outside in five minutes for a starhook. You’ll be in quarantine upon return.”

Then it’s gone.

My three companions are sprawled on the floor, sweating.

Infected. Quarantine.

“When we saw you,” I say, “you walked over to us, touched me.” My hand goes up to my face.

“Acolmiztli gave it to me, and I passed it to you,” Jami says.

“Is it fatal?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Better get back up to orbit and find out, right? I look alright, but I could have take an antidote.” He smiles.

I purse my lips.

“Get up,” I order everyone. It’s been interesting being in charge, but I’m glad to see the end of it coming. Paige, Smith, and Steve struggle up. Smith leans heavily on Steve. “Get outside, now.” Smith nods. He must still be able to understand me, which is a small comfort in the middle of this mess.

We’re a pathetic group that pushes through the door with Jami following us. My knees wobble, but I manage a convincing stride through what looks like a bar.

Dim lights cast shadows, and from those shadows loom wooden tables where several men in khaki camouflage toast us with their glasses and sly grins. I see no weapons, but my stomach churns with the weapon they’ve already used to defeat us.

My gut spasms. The pain almost blinds me.

“Come on.” I push my three soldiers on in front of me, shoving my hand against their hard armor, ignoring an unidentifiable chuckle from somewhere in the room.

I trip over a chair, grab the table to steady myself, and when I blink everything is blurry. I have no soldier-sharp senses, no wired edge for combat. The armor I wear to assist me do all that is failing as well as my body.

Right before me is an aquarium taller than I am and stretching half the nearest wall’s length. Something moves sinuously through the tank and presses against the glass. I stumble closer and a woman stares back at me through the refracted water and solid glass with wide brown eyes. Sheets of her oak-coloured hair twirl behind her head. Her ultra-pale skin has an almost greenish tint.

The eyes hold me until my face presses right against the glass.

“Beautiful, isn’t she?” Acolmiztli grabs my shoulder. “She was a present I inherited from one of my brothers. A gift from the Emporer Moctezuma the Ninth. One of the
teotl
created her for him.”

Her smooth stomach fades into the singular muscle and pilot fins of her tail’s trunk. The wide fins are splayed out. They’re delicate, yet powerful enough to drive all six feet of her through the water with a flick.

Which she does. Out away from the glass.

“Created?” I ask. And then, “
Teotl
?”

She turns back, looks at me, and her hands flutter.

“Created just like we were,” Acolmiztli whispers. “But unlike my countrymen, there is only one of her, and many, many of us.”

We have to keep moving, he’s just toying with me. I walk away from the tank.

“Keep moving, dammit,” I say. Smith looks at me and frowns. He shakes his head, points to his ears. He doesn’t understand a word. His hearing implants must have failed. Could a virus do that?

We keep walking, and pass out of the door into the sunlight. I lean back and look at the sky. Nothing yet.

“Why are you doing this to us?” I ask Jami, who is still right behind us.

“The Azteca doing it to you, not me.”

“But you knew about it,” I snap.

“Yes.”

“And yet you did nothing. You collaborate with them.”

“You the one that drop out the sky and land. We didn’t force you.”

Overhead I hear a roar, then a rumble.

“But all those deaths. . . .”

“All because of you. Consider: before you came we were changing the Azteca from the bottom up, and inside out. The Azteca a hornet’s nest, and we blow some sweet smoke their way. Now you throwing rocks.”

Thunder rolls and a small oval speck drops out of the sky. The long carbon filament trailing behind it is strong enough to reel us all up from the ground we’re standing on into orbit and then into the hold of a waiting mothership.

“Snap in when it drops,” I order everyone, voice husky. “Paige, make sure to help Smith, he can’t hear what we’re saying.”

I turn and look at Jami, dizziness threatening to drop me at any second.

The pod slows to a halt and falls into our midst. Paige struggles over and snaps on, pulling Smith with her and making sure he got hooked in. Steve looks at me and follows suit. Three soldiers, ready to get lifted, the cable rising up into the heavens from between them.

“We have a minute, maybe two,” Steve says to me.

I’m still staring at Jami.

He stares right back. “We study you. When faced with the other, when the hard times had hit, you choose to cleanse the aliens from all the human worlds. And right now you all still working on ‘purifying’ The League. Making it only human.”

“There was no other choice,” I say. “There were wars. Humanity was endangered. Dammit, I was four. You can’t hold me responsible. It’s different now anyway.”

“You had start with war. Then deporting the rest from any human territory. But The League ain’t stopping there, right? Now The League tries to manage the entire human bloodline, disqualifying humans with altered DNA.”

“Like the Azteca,” I say. That is why Alcolmiztli has no love for us. He knows The League doesn’t recognize him as human.

“Yes. Listen, during all these years we been cut off here all of you all almost wipe yourselves out. Yet you come here to tell us what to do now? That’s hypocritical.”

“Drastic things were done,” I admit. “But we never would have survived the alien attacks if we didn’t do these things. We could never have matched their superior military skills and constant encroachment.” And, despite the fever, I have a trump. “You talk hypocritical. Hypocritical is the mermaid,” I hiss. “You let that Azteca keep his slave in a tank. How dirty does that make you?”

I might as well have struck Jami.

“The line is tightening,” Steve yells at me.

“Maybe you right. Maybe them thing had to be done. But that don’t mean you have to force it on all of us here,” Jami said. “And think of this: your League only concerned about ‘pure’ humans, right? Then that girl back in the tank there, she ain’t even considered human by them.”

He’s right.

I stumble towards the pod. In a second I’ll be yanked out of here into the stratosphere, my suit bubbling out to enclose and protect me. Back to the warrens inside the depths of a troop ship.

But his words are resonating with me. I don’t clip in.

“We ain’t ignorant,” Jami said. “When the wormhole had close, we was all left with each other. We made plenty mistake, but we have a history of adaptation. The alien
Teotl
who create the Azteca, and the Azteca, we all shared just this world uneasy at first. The Azteca had been create to destroy all of we, because during the first war we had almost destroy the
Teotl
.

“And that ain’t what The League wants, right?” Jami spreads his hands. “The League want keep fighting, and fighting. It coming at all of we here, threatening things and too blind to see that we already figuring out how to make it work, balancing Azteca and
Teotl
, changing things. We ain’t done yet, but we was well on the way before you came. So you a superior force, with bigger guns. And we had to go and use something you all didn’t expect. The only way you can find out how to deal with the infection is to talk with all of us all down here. That’s why we work with the Azteca on this, and get the antidote from them. Now we all go have to work together.”

Jami is speaking mostly to me, but the message is general. Let’s work together.

The people on this planet want to figure out how best to handle the new situation that just opened up in their backyard. The League will somehow need to help liaise between this tripartite mess it’s found itself in, and certainly not in the dominant position it thought it would have.

I remember a small biological part of what being human is. The reason we fear the alien, death, and why The League fights so hard and maniacally against
everything
.

Survival.

I can see a way out of my infected situation that doesn’t involve quarantine.

Smith signs something at me. A hand flutter, like that of the woman in the tank.

I turn to Jami.

“I would like to stay and help you talk to the League,” I tell him. “But I want the same antidote you have, okay?”

Jami nods. “The very same. I promise you.”

Paige recognizes what is happening.

“You can’t desert,” she shouts. “They’ll deactivate you.”

The rest of the objection is lost. The starhook goes taut and all three of them lift off the ground and accelerate towards space.

I drop to my hands and knees and puke. Tiny pieces of machinery I didn’t even know were in me litter the grass along with the remains of pasty meals from the last day of eating.

With a deep breath, I stand up again.

Jami helps steady me.

“I have a condition,” he says. “You have to help me free her.” He’s talking about the lady in the aquarium.

She’s been in the bar for weeks, he tells me as he helps me back across the lawn. Ever since The League began its bombardment and invasion. Acolmiztli brought her here with him. He won’t let her go, despite Jami’s arguing for it. Acolmiztli’s brother died a long time ago, and this is all he has left to remember him by.

Jami can’t free her. If he were to set her free Acolmiztli would blame him, it would create a diplomatic stir in the middle of a delicate time. But a rogue League soldier with a soft heart, a human heart, could do it.

“Just give me the antidote, please,” I beg. “I’ll help you.”