Thirty-Five
Thirty-Five
C ampar sat on a thin, cloth-backed stool with a cup of cool water in his hands.
The benches in Dafyd Alkhor’s little garden were fine, but his back ached if he sat too long on a hard surface.
It ached if he lay down for too long or lifted anything too heavy.
It ached if there was any opportunity to ache, but the benches were especially challenging.
The new woman—Clae—had one to herself, Dafyd the other. Soft Lothark guards loitered at the archway back into the great structure like tired factory workers waiting for a late-night transport home. The Rak-hund had curled itself into a resting spiral.
“Did you see human beings?” the woman asked.
There was something very familiar about her.
Not her looks—Campar was quite sure he hadn’t met her before—but the way she spoke and held herself kept ringing bells.
Like she’d learned from the same lecturer and picked up some of their mannerisms. There was a story, he was sure, about how this unknown had become Dafyd’s trusted confederate.
They hadn’t told him what it was yet, and he hadn’t asked.
“Not alive, no,” Campar said. “And the corpses outside the protected bridge were pretty badly gone. Inside it, though? They were dead, but they were unmistakable.”
“The one that came back alive,” Dafyd said. “Tell me about it.”
“I’m fairly certain it was one of the starfish octopuses. Pentapus? The remaining arms were the right length and conformation, and when it moved, it kept acting like it expected missing limbs to be there.”
“Did it talk to you?” Clae asked.
“No. It went right for violence. But… I don’t think it was alive, not really.
It was more like a mechanism that thought it was a starfish.
I mean, I poked and prodded at it for quite a while trying to get samples.
It didn’t start moving until the rest of the ship got power back too. And then it appeared to be immediate.”
“Like it was equipment,” Dafyd said. “Not a living thing itself, but something that worked with a living thing, even when the living thing was gone.”
Campar shrugged. “That’s how it seemed to me.”
Clae and Dafyd exchanged a glance that might have had some significance to them. Campar took a sip from his water cup. The cool in his throat was welcome.
“All right,” Dafyd said. “Tell me what you can about the other aliens that were traveling with you.”
Campar told them about Vaudai and the Budon of Luus. The beetle-things. The Sinen and the Soft Lothark and what he remembered of the soldiers of the Carryx. He didn’t know what details would be useful, so he tried to include all of them. If Dafyd was getting weary, it was his job to say so.
It felt like they’d been talking for hours, but the sun had hardly moved in the world-palace’s sky.
Eventually, the new woman made her exit, saying she needed to go look something up.
Dafyd seemed to have some idea what that meant, but they didn’t fold Campar into their charmed circle.
He took her retreat as the end of the official meeting and the beginning of the unofficial one.
“I was sorry to hear about Tonner,” Campar said. “And Rickar too. We became close on the trip out, before they separated us. I wish we’d been kinder to him… before.”
He meant in the old days, back on Anjiin, when they’d treated Rickar like a traitor for his part in taking their research from them. Back in the laughably na?ve days when things like who got the credit for a discovery seemed important.
“There aren’t many of us left.”
“There are not. Can I ask you a question?”
Dafyd’s smile was rueful, but at least it was a smile. “You can ask, but I’m not sure I know as many answers as my reputation suggests.”
“It’s just that…” Campar said, then had to gather himself. “It’s just that Rickar should have been with me. When they divided us up, he traded places with a man I’ve been seeing. I can’t help wondering what would have happened if he hadn’t.”
“There’s no way to know,” Dafyd said. “You can’t carry that.”
“I seem suited to try, though. Do we know what killed him?”
“War,” Dafyd said. There was more weight in the shrug than there would have been in tears.
Campar would have stayed and talked just for the pleasure of visiting someone with whom he had a real history, but he could feel his energy starting to flag. He finished his water and took his cane. Dafyd embraced him gently in farewell, and then let him go.
His new quarters were two stories down, close to the common room and a series of chambers that were being built out into a kind of gymnasium and public park. One day, it would be pleasant, but for now it was construction noise and the smell of dust.
The Carryx architecture tended more toward ramps than stairways. Campar made his way at a gentle pace, and by the time he reached his door, he was starting to get his second wind. That was a new and welcome thing.
His memory of the journey back to the world-palace had less to do with history than with a kind of extended nightmare.
There were some episodes that stood out.
He remembered Ghati shouting at their Sinen overseer, demanding some medical attention or supply.
He remembered his surprise and dismay the second time his skin started sloughing off like the remnants of a bad sunburn.
The uncanny turbulence of asymmetric space and the muttering of the Budon.
Beyond that, he’d been too ill to know much of anything.
The fields he’d been caught in hadn’t killed him, but they’d scattered a mesh of injury all through his body.
And Ghati’s. And Vaudai’s for that matter.
He had been exposed the longest and hurt the worst, but his lover and his alien friend had paid a price to save him.
Ghati’s worst scar was an angry nerve that ran from his neck to one arm.
The damage wasn’t visible, but some nights it hurt him enough that he wept in his sleep.
Campar had several little neuropathies like it, and also weakness and an easy, unpredictable exhaustion.
Probably his metabolism was a mess, but there wasn’t a hospital for the human moiety, because no one had built one yet.
The physician he’d seen when they’d reached the new compound advised a lot of water and a lot of rest. That prescription had suited Campar fine.
When he opened his door, Ghati was sitting at their little table.
The fiction that they weren’t a couple had ended on the return trip without any conversation about it.
Now they were home and, Campar hoped, settling into some strange version of domestic bliss, as blissful as one can be riddled with injuries caused by alien superweapons.
On the table sat two plates of salad greens topped with a dusting of some sort of nutty brown protein and a clear dressing that smelled wonderful. The smaller man stood up as Campar sat down, and then helped push his chair in.
“Thank you, my dear,” Campar said. “Though I’m not entirely invalided yet.”
“I’m allowed to be nice if I want to,” Ghati said.
“You absolutely are,” Campar agreed, and took a forkful of the salad.
Having something that resembled real food was a deeper pleasure than he’d expected.
After so long living on the nutritional paste of the ships, something with a little crunch and taste of green leaf was revelatory.
Campar chewed, attending to the way the taste and texture changed as the food started breaking down.
When there was no more pleasure to be taken from it, he turned to Ghati.
“I take it, if you’re being so nice, that the news is bad. ”
Ghati’s chagrin was gone in a moment, but Campar saw it and Ghati knew he had.
“There’s another mission,” Ghati said. “Not to the battlefront this time. Some kind of very old scaffold around a star that the Carryx have controlled for eons and want someone to go take a look at.”
The food had lost its savor. Campar pushed the plate away. He tried a smile, but it didn’t work. “And they picked you to survey it?”
“No,” Ghati said. “They picked Vaudai, and he asked that I go along. I think he asked for us both, but you’re recuperating from the last one. So that left me. Apparently, the gooey little footstool likes working with us.” The lightness in Ghati’s voice was thin. Campar took the man’s hand.
“We can push back. I was in a research group with Alkhor. We’re friends. If anyone can convince the Carryx to send someone else in your place, it’s him. I just met with him. I can go back now, and we’ll have this taken care of by bedtime.”
Ghati went over and sat on the edge of the bed, just far enough away that Campar couldn’t reach for him from his chair.
His face twisted and moved through a variety of expressions without landing on one, but Campar had seen that face in so many moods.
Joyful, terrified, crushed by dread. What he saw there now broke his heart.
“We never meant this to be anything when we started.”
“It was something for me, though.”
“And I think I love you,” Ghati said. “I really think I do. But this connection? It’s not something we should try to hold on to.”
“Why not?”
“Because we can’t hold on to things. Because there is so much happening now that we don’t influence, much less control. I just think it would be better if we were more like water. Let the universe tell us what shape it needs us to be, and be that. Change when the universe changes.”
“You’re going to get scared again. You’re going to get depressed again. I won’t be there to help, and I hate that. Let’s fight for each other a little, can’t we?”
“No,” Ghati said. “It’s not that I don’t want to fight. But when I watched you almost die I knew I could never do that again. Whatever rips us apart the next time will be a hundred times worse for me. This way… This way, I can stand it. You see that, don’t you?”