“So this is how it ends,” Matt said. “Up against a fucking wall.”
He sat warming his feet in front of a fire in a hut in the detention camp on the island in the sound off New Babylon’s harbor, smoking a cigarette and drinking whiskey. Susan had brought a good supply of both. Matt’s fellow prisoners, Salasso and Volkov, sat with him and her around the fire, variously soothing their angst and ennui with hemp and whiskey. They both nodded philosophically. Their attitude annoyed Susan intensely.
“You shouldn’t just give up,” she said.
“I’ve had a long life,” Matt said, “and I’m not too bothered by the prospect of not having more of it. I’m after immortality.”
Volkov snorted. “Immortality doesn’t last, my friend. I’ve outlived mine already. All it takes is a good hammer.”
Salasso, who was evidently turning his last weeks or months to good account by testing the limits of his species’ capacity to smoke hemp and stay conscious, turned a loll of the head into a nod. This irritated Susan even more.
“Your crewmates are doing everything they can for you. You could at least pretend you appreciate their efforts.”
“We do,” said Matt. “But we know they’re not going to get anywhere. And so do you.”
Susan nodded glumly. She had spoken often enough to Phil, Ann, and the others, who had not been indicted and seemed to feel obscurely guilty about that. They had petitioned and agitated with a sort of Mingulayan Scoffer militancy and naivete, and had almost been lynched themselves. It was like defending child murderers.
“Your appeals might get through the Senate,” she said. “And then there’s the Assembly of Notables.”
The two men guffawed. Salasso’s shoulders shook a little. The winter wind rattled the windows; even now, in mid-morning, the place felt like night. Farther up the fuggy hut sat other men, Volkovist prisoners and a few criminals, around other fireplaces and around tables of dominoes and checkers. A few of them read. There was nothing much else to do. All of them kept a respectful distance from the dead men on leave, and had even refrained from overt primate displays when she had walked in. They knew who she was, and who she was with. It was far from her first visit.
She had arrived by a Prison Department launch across the choppy water of the sound, through rain and sleet. New Babylon’s winters were cold and pervasively damp, the converse of its hot and pervasively humid summer. She had found a niche there—a politically savvy and, at the same time, inquisitive and naive journalist, especially one from off-world, was just what the newly liberated media wanted—but she hated the place. There was too much of the prehuman in New Babylon, and not only in its architecture. Something in the culture of the place looked back to an age of giants. Too much antiquity, too much continuity, had accumulated here for it to be a place where something new could begin. No wonder Volkov had failed; as, in a different way, de Zama was failing. Susan wanted to get away, to do things that had never been done before, to see new worlds like that of the selkies, outside the Second Sphere altogether and away. At the same time she wanted to stay here, to be with Matt and the others to the bitter end, or to help them avert that end. She wanted her experiences, her very self, to be multiple. She realized she was thinking like a Multiplier.
Matt wasn’t, instead contemplating his end with a gloomy relish. He pointed out of the nearest window, which overlooked the sound and afforded through the rain and mist a view of the city’s mutilated skyline.
“Look at that,” he said. “No matter what the gods do that should make people angry, it only makes them more afraid. Cringing bastards. They’re as bad as the fucking saurs, no offense, Salasso.”
“No offense is taken,” said Salasso. “I despise them myself. Even millions of years after something much worse than genocide was committed against my people, they still regard the gods as good and theicide as the ultimate sin.”
“The Multis don’t,” said Susan. “They would be quite delighted to help you escape. To help us. The migration will continue after the Bright Star Cultures arrive, you know. There are people—humans and saurs—who are interested in going with it. Hundreds of light-years, thousands, right across to the next spiral arm. They could take you off the island at a word, and hide you in the forest until—”
“No,” said Salasso.
“Not a chance,” said Matt. “I’m not running away. I’m not giving these people the satisfaction. Fuck ’em. They either accept self-defense and retaliation as a justification for theicide, or not. If they don’t, then nothing we’ve done means anything anyway. I don’t want to live another few hundred years, or whatever I’ve got left, with the gods behind the back of my neck.”
Susan wanted to shake him. “Look, when the Bright Star Cultures arrive, this’ll all change. The Illyrians, the Postmodern Regime, whatever—they’ll all be overwhelmed by people like us, people who have the Multiplier outlook, not just the infection but the attitudes. Besides, the Cairns Fleet sent us to do a job, and we did it. They can’t let you be shot for doing what you had to do.”
“Well, yes,” said Matt, more cheerfully. “There is that.”
They came in the spring, on the eighth day of the month Florida, A.C. 10,350. A swarm of ships like enormous flies—multilegged, wide-bellied, stubby-winged—appeared suddenly in the sky above New Babylon. Susan, walking down Astronaut Avenue in the green fresh post-rainshower morning to cover a story—for Junopolis Calls, ironically enough—about the rebuilding of the Ninth HQ, saw them and saw the city stop around her. She started running. The ships came down so fast they had disappeared behind buildings before she could see where they were landing, but she made a guess that they would head for parks, and so she turned at a corner and ran along a side street of apartment houses and there it was squatting on the grass among the trees like a piece of play equipment for giant children.
Around her other people approached more cautiously. Among them a couple of members of the militia, the Ninth, had unslung their plasma rifles and were talking fast into their radios as they jogged forward, bravely in the circumstances. Susan outran them all, vaulted a low fence and padded across damp trampled grass. The only children in the park this early were quite young. They bawled and clutched at their mothers or stared, thumb in mouth, at the ship. Flying squirrels fled to the trees and chattered abuse.
A curved segment of the side of the ship slid back and a ladder rattled down. Susan was by now close enough to see and hear it. The mechanism was reassuringly clunky and creaky, not like the seamless refinement of the Multiplier or even saur skiffs. It wanted oiling somewhere. A young man in loose green fatigues came down the ladder and stood at the foot of it, blinking in the sunlight and gazing at the buildings and the slowly gathering crowd. From the dark of the hatch at the top other faces, including children’s, peered out. The man shaded his eyes with one hand and waved with the other.
“Trade Latin still spoken here?” he called out.
“Yes,” said Susan, walking up to him and holding out a hand. She had the camera and the mike on the side of her head. “You should really try to say something more historic. Anyway, welcome to New Babylon.”
“Thank you,” said the man, shaking hands. “Are you a Mingulayan?”
“Yes,” said Susan. “I came here with Matt Cairns.”
“Oh my God,” the man said, in English. “You’re the one who’s fucking historic.” He waved vaguely in the direction of the harbor. “The First Navigator’s ship is coming down over there. You should probably go and report to him.”
“Yes,” said Susan, stepping back to let the militiamen check the guy out. “I probably should.”
The people from the neighborhood were still hanging back about fifty meters away, as if that would make them any safer. The arrival of the ships, and even their appearance, was not unexpected. But it was only when a purple and a red Multiplier descended the ladder, stepping down after a few more adults and children had emerged and stood around on the grass talking to the militiamen and a few other bold locals, that the crowd surged forward, children in the lead. The new arrivals were almost bowled over, and the Multipliers had to move their limbs smartly and skitter about in a slightly threatening manner to clear some space around themselves.
“Make things!” the children were shouting. “Make things for us! Please!”
In the past half-year, since the Crisis (as it was now called, or the Events) the Multipliers who had arrived with the Investigator had themselves multiplied by the thousands. They had begun to integrate and educate the numerous free-living small offspring that had resulted from the mass infections that had spread from the recovering casualties of the attack. They had taken up residence in old warehouses and under piers and bridges. They roamed the streets and conjured things out of air and grass and dirt. They talked on the radio and on television, wheezing and waving their limbs like mad old scientists. It was all strange and unsettling, but also in a way reassuring to the people of New Babylon. The whimsical frivolity of their conjurings—here a piece of jewelery, there a machine for making shoes—and their enthusiasm and curiosity as they scuttled around factories and fingered all the pages of all the volumes of the great libraries, all this could not help but charm. The decades of preparing to fight off the dreaded Spiders only increased the relief at the arrival of these engaging octopods. Eight-limbed fuzzy shapes of many different colors had become the most popular type of soft toy.
Susan made her way out of the park and back to the avenue, where she headed for the nearest underground station. Street-level traffic looked like it would remain snarled up for hours. The trains were unaffected. She emerged from the underground at Port Station One and immediately found another crowd surrounding several of the Bright Star Culture ships. Multipliers swarmed in the trees, displacing complaining flocks of flying squirrels. Multiplier skiffs flitted, autogyros hovered overhead, microphones and cameras dangling—she was not filing the story of the century, and she didn’t care. The search took a while, during which she ruthlessly used her journalist’s card and her elbows. Eventually she found the ship of the First Navigator, and her parents.
They were in a small inner ring of people: the President and her entourage and bodyguards, who had arrived, grandly enough, by skiff. Susan saw Elizabeth and Gregor through the surrounding heads and almost did not recognize them. She had thought of their parting as being over a century long, which of course was irrational—they had traveled the hundred-odd light-years in not much more time than she had, with stops of a few days or weeks while the next course was plotted and new ships were built. Somehow this brought home to her for the first time the sheer force of the Multiplier migration, its quality of being a cascading explosion of thistledown birling through and filling and abhorring the vacuum. Her parents had been changed in those months, perhaps more than she had; they looked younger, almost as young as herself. It was weirder than seeing Matt naked and remembering he was centuries old. She had a shocking premonition that a world in which the senior generation did not grow older would have its disadvantages that could only be overcome by endless expansion, if the hominidae were not to become a second version of the saurs. Almost she started her own trajectory in that expansion right then; almost, she fled. But Elizabeth saw her and smiled, and Susan pushed through and rushed forward. She hugged Elizabeth and Gregor, everyone babbled for a bit, and then became serious again. The conversation with the President resumed, slightly out of Susan’s earshot.
Susan slid a finger under her hair and switched on her recording equipment. Her channel might as well get some benefit from her proximity. As Susan watched her parents talking to Julia de Zama and to the President’s new security adviser, a memorably forgettable-looking man called Gaius Gonatus, she found herself standing beside another of the President’s entourage, Lydia de Tenebre. She’d met the Trader woman at some diplomatic banquet whose afterglow had been open to the press, and had interviewed her briefly. Lydia was now some kind of high official in the Space Authority, and spent much of her time, as far as Susan could make out, trying to reassure the saurs and krakens on newly arrived Trader ships, without much success so far, other than to persuade one or two saurs to remain with their skiffs. Hence, no doubt, the President’s prestige vehicle.
Susan smiled sideways at Lydia, who looked as though she too had been pushed to one side.
“It’s like a conspiracy,” Lydia said quietly. “A conspiracy of the old against the young. Except they now have the advantage of experience, and we don’t have the advantage of vigor.”
Susan nodded, craning to catch what was being said, upping the gain on her mike. The voices became clearer. As she leaned closer she suddenly realized they were talking about the theicides.
“No question,” her mother was saying, “it’s a hard one, but we can’t intervene. It’s a capital crime in our code too, one of the few—”
“No!” Susan’s outcry was involuntary, turning heads, raising eyebrows. She broke into the charmed circle and confronted her mother.
“You can’t let them carry out the executions!” she said. “You can’t let them kill Salasso!”
Elizabeth looked at her sadly. “I can and will,” she said. “Look, I’m sorry, Susan. I loved that saur, and Matt I liked and Volkov I could, well, I could stand, but it’s out of my hands, it’s out of the President’s hands. We can’t let theicide go unpunished. The precedent is too dangerous. There are some crimes that can’t be forgiven. That’s why we have the category of heinous crimes, and theicide is one of them—in the Bright Star Cultures too.”
“But everything else is changing around us,” Susan protested. “The Multipliers, they’re changing everything, they’re changing us. They’ve changed you. Why can’t we change the law, or at least recognize that this time it was justified?”
“That’s exactly why we can’t change it,” said Elizabeth. “It’s very difficult to maintain our humanity. The Multiplier outlook literally infiltrates us. We have their worldview in our blood. There is a continuous option to simply dissolve into Spiders, if not physically then culturally. For that reason we maintain our own laws with scrupulous severity. And we are not going to interfere with New Babylon’s.”
Susan’s vision of Elizabeth blurred. She felt as though she had been punched in the stomach by this stranger who could have been her sister. Her father’s face was more concerned but, with its tracery of smoothed-out creases, too frighteningly reminiscent of Mart’s to be of any comfort.
“What bloody humanity?” Susan shouted. “Just because you’re the Science Officer doesn’t make you—”
“Don’t lose it with me,” Elizabeth said, in a flat, calm voice. It was an order Susan had last heard at the age of nine. It infuriated her to hear it now, but it had its effect, a cold blade in the belly.
Susan blinked hard, clenching her fists at her sides. “You’ve lost it already,” she said. “Your humanity.”
She knew this was not true. It was a stone to hand, and she threw it, and she could see the hurt and she didn’t care. She could see right through her mother to the omnipresent deity infinitely greater than the gods, and she could not see why Elizabeth couldn’t see it too, in her and in the condemned. Or did she, she thought wildly, and did it make no difference?
Susan whirled on de Zama. The young-old President was a very strange-looking person, her smooth skin thin and shining, like the paper of a lantern over her bones.
“Can’t you at least use your gods-damned prerogative, Madame? Can’t you give clemency? Surely you still feel something for Volkov, he was your partner”—in crime, she almost said—“for fifty years or longer, and you have already killed him once! Isn’t that enough?”
“For that very reason I cannot give clemency,” said de Zama, quite unperturbed by Susan’s flaming disrespect. “People would say it was personal. And I cannot give clemency to the other two without giving it to Grigory Andreievich. In any case, when the people have spoken, and the Senate has spoken, and all the world knows what the Notables will say, it would be a foolish President who cast the prerogative in their teeth. There would be a constitutional crisis, which with things as they are we cannot afford.” She spread her hands. “With the best will in the world I could not do it.”
And you do not have the best will in the world!
Susan turned and walked away, out through the inner circle and the growing crowd. She had just reached the area of devastation at the bottom of Astronaut Avenue when Lydia caught up with her.
“I can’t stand it either,” Lydia said. “Come on—we can’t stand for this, we can do something.”
She seemed furious and determined, standing there in the grey dust, incongruous in a fluttery, flower-printed silk trouser-suit and platform shoes.
“What can we do?” Susan asked.
“We have experienced the Multiplier enlightenment,” said Lydia. “We can think of something.”
“So have they!” said Susan. “Much good it does them!”
Lydia laid a hand on her arm. “That’s no reason for us not to use our heads. Come on.”
“Where? Where is there to go?”
Susan sniffed noisily and wiped her nose on her sleeve. She felt disgusted with herself. She switched the recording gear off. Lydia put an arm around her shoulders, and that made them start to shake. Susan willed their shaking to stop, but it didn’t. Lydia said nothing for a while. When Susan opened her eyes again, Lydia was regarding her soberly. Susan blinked away the rainbow effects on her eyelashes, sniffled noisily again, smiled weakly.
“I don’t know about me,” said Lydia, “but you could use a drink.”
Susan took a deep breath. “Oh, yes.”
Lydia led Susan around a corner into one of the relatively undamaged shorefront streets, to a drinking den called The New Moon’s Arms. The sign that swung above the door was a stylized orbital fort, petaled with solar power panels, bristling with weaponry.
“Old malcontent hangout,” Lydia said as she held the door open. “I suppose it’s still bugged.” She laughed suddenly. “This time it’ll be Gonatus who will be listening.”
It was almost empty, and the barman was watching television, agog at the landings, begrudging the attention it took to pour them drinks. The pictures flickered silently; he was listening in with earphones.
“Amazing,” he kept saying. “Amazing. A great day.”
“A great day,” Lydia agreed. She bought a clinking double handful of bottles. Susan turned away to sit down. Lydia caught her elbow.
“Outside,” she said.
They returned to Astronaut Avenue and sat down with their backs against one of the Volkov plinths. A selkie, walking past, glanced down at them from its swaying height, then strolled on, rubbernecking. Lydia wrenched the tops off two of the bottles. The drinks were sugarcane spirit diluted with a bittersweet juice. It tasted rough.
“What was that about Gonatus?” Susan asked. She had to talk about something else for a while. They would get back to what they had to talk about soon enough. From here, the prison island was visible on the horizon.
“I first met him last year,” Lydia said, “about the time you people showed up. I took him to that bar back there for what I thought was a secure enough chat. I was a malcontent and he was an Illyrian spy. Still is, I suppose.”
“Perhaps I should file that story with Junopolis Calls,” said Susan, with a shaky laugh. “Give them one scoop at least, having missed today’s big news.”
“Oh, they’ll know,” said Lydia. “They’ll spike it.”
“You know my employers better than I do?”
“Yes,” said Lydia, unabashed. “I’ve lived here longer than you have. A hell of a lot longer. It’s not like good old free-wheeling, free-thinking Mingulay. They have security apparats here that go back to deep antiquity. And the Illyrian one, remember, is just a chunk of the old Nova Babylonian one that broke away.”
“And Gonatus has just changed departments?”
Lydia smiled sourly. “Yes, you could see it like that. He’s an interesting guy, in his way. Very intense, very sincere, strange though it is to say about a spy.”
“What was his interest in you?”
“Well, I worked in the Space Authority, I had been in the Bright Star Cultures, and I had known Volkov.”
They looked at each other. Susan put her drink down. The bottle drummed momentarily as it touched the pavement. “I think you have some explaining to do,” she said.
After a while she interrupted and said: “You were once in love with Gregor? My father!”
“Yes,” said Lydia. “Well, maybe, but . . . anyway, that’s why it was so weird just now, seeing him just as he was when I knew him twelve years ago.”
“Twelve—oh, right. I see. I think.”
Susan pulled out a notebook—it was a local one, made from paper, which, as Matt had once said, sure cracked the screen-resolution problem—and started writing names and drawing lines.
“Fuck,” she said. “It’s lucky none of you had a sexually transmissible disease.”
Susan opened another bottle. The pain of her parents’ refusal to intervene was still like a coiled snake in her belly. The alcohol was stunning it, but it would come back. She would vomit it out.
“So is this why you want to save them?”
“No,” said Lydia, bleakly. “I want to save them because they were right. They don’t deserve to end up against a wall.”
“A wall is what all this feels like,” said Susan. She knocked the back of her head on the plinth. It hurt a little. “And I’m bashing my head against it.”
“Every wall has its weak points.”
“The weakest point I can see,” Susan said, “and the only one we can work on directly, is their bloody-minded refusal to escape.” She clenched her fist in front of her. Her knuckles were grazed, she noticed from a distance. She looked out past the docks and the harbor to the island. “They could do it, you know. I could raise enough Multis to lift them off within minutes. But they’d have to be dragged, because they think they’d lose the argument by fleeing.”
“Fuck them and their fucking arguments,” said Lydia vehemently. “They’d rather die than lose, and they can’t win. It’s not a political argument, it’s not even a cultural one, it’s a . . . I don’t know, a superstition. How is it that we can see past that, and the Multis can, and our friends themselves can, and most people can’t? When did we lose our respect for the gods? How did we lose our fear?” She nibbled at her lower lip. “I don’t remember, myself. I haven’t feared the gods since I was a little girl. Not since after my first journey.”
Susan frowned. “Space travel?” she said. “Lightspeed jumps? That’s what we all have in common. Even the Marines who went along with our attack on the god.”
Lydia shook her head. “Doesn’t work. Your parents—”
“My parents don’t fear the gods! They’re just committed to the law taking its course for political reasons, cultural reasons. They think there’s a line to hold—damn them.”
“You’re right,” said Lydia. “And Esias and Faustina and all my family, even Voronar, an old saur who stuck around with us, they don’t have that horror either, and they’re pretty conservative. I mean, apart from Faustina”—she waved a finger at Susan’s scribbled diagram—“they’d be happy to see Volkov shot, they detested what he did to this city, and Salasso and Matt mean nothing to them, but they don’t execrate them like everyone seems to be assuming everyone does.”
Susan thought over all the buzz and mutter she’d heard in the past months, weeks, hours. “Well, about everybody else, they’re right.”
“Vox populi, vox Dei, huh?” Lydia said bitterly.
The voice of the people is the voice of God. Which people, and which god?
“That’s it,” said Susan, with a cold feeling like water down her back. “That is it.”
“What is?”
“The answer. It is space travel. I mean, I can see how it might be.”
She felt a sudden surge of relief, perhaps no more than a rebound from her earlier dismay and despair, but it was something to feel hope again. She jumped up and drained her bottle and hurled it to crash on the rubble, and reached down to grab Lydia by the hand. “Come on, get up. We have to talk to some of the Bright Star Culture people. If I’m right, they’ll feel the same as we do.”
She fell over. Lydia helped her up and made to go back to the area around Port Station One.
“Not back there,” Susan said. “One of the small parks.”
Taking a complex route through side alleys to circle around the area of destruction and reconstruction, Lydia led the way unerringly to the nearest park. A Bright Star Culture ship squatted there, and around it stalls had been set up, by the humans and saurs and Multipliers on board and by those of the locals whose entrepreneurial talents had emerged from under the overturned bushel of the Modern Regime.
Lydia said: “This is just like something I saw before, on Novakkad. We’re becoming a Bright Star Culture already.”
“How long do you think trade will last, when the Multis can reproduce anything?”
Lydia looked at her sideways. “Good question. What the ships end up selling is space travel, and the access to space to gather the exotica to make more ships.”
Susan grinned. “Good.”
“Why?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
They walked over and started talking to the Traders. Almost every one of the new arrivals were shocked at what was being done to people whom they regarded—once the background had been quickly filled in—as heroes. Many of them hadn’t even known about the advance expedition, and how it had saved them from being blasted from the skies as soon as they emerged from the jump. With the locals it was a different story entirely.
“These three?” The man they bought coffee from drew a finger across his throat. “They should have been shot months ago.” He leaned closer. “You know, it’s safe to say now, I always admired old Volkov, got that from my own old man, real old Modernist he was. But now, gods above—” He caught himself and chuckled nervously. “So to speak. Volkov and the others killed a god. The sooner they’re rotting in Traitors’ Pit, the better for all of us.”
With that, quite unselfconsciously, he looked up and shivered.
“Hmm,” said Susan. “Thanks for sharing your thoughts.”
They wandered on. The coffee didn’t really sober Susan, and she became less discreet in her questions. After one particularly awkward moment, the two women had to flee the park.
“Are we satisfied?” said Lydia, as they emerged halfway up Astronaut Avenue after running a kilometer through a warren of apartment blocks. Traffic was getting back to normal, but people were still hanging around and talking a lot. The early edition newspapers were being so eagerly snatched up that Susan felt vaguely in dereliction of duty.
Susan ducked her head around the corner. No signs of pursuit. “I don’t know,” she said, a little short of breath, heart pounding, “but I think we’re safe.”
“Good,” said Lydia, putting her shoes back on as the cuts in her feet cleaned themselves. “Now, can you tell me what difference this is going to make?”
Susan told her. “It’s Lithos,” she said. “It’s the god in the world, the god under our feet.” She looked down and swayed. Lydia steadied her. “The gods in all the worlds. They fuck with our heads. It’s only by space travel that we break the bond. You see?”
Lydia shook her head. “I don’t see what difference it makes, except to make things worse. Nothing we do can make people who’ve never traveled through space change their minds about theicide.”
Susan looked at her. Gods, the woman could be so stupid sometimes.
“Exactly,” she said, straightening up and letting go of Lydia’s arm and walking on very steadily. “So there’s no need for our friends to die if it won’t change anything.”
“I think we can sell them that,” Lydia said. “That one will fly.” Her expression became distant, calculating. “Or if not that, something else. Do you have a phone number for any of the Investigator crew?”
“Oh, sure, I have them all.”
Lydia jerked a thumb toward a newly repaired public phone stall. “Call them now.”
“You aren’t thinking of—”
“Maybe,” said Lydia, “but the first thing we have to do is check this out with your friend Mr. Orange. Come to think of it,” she added, “a lift to the island by skiff would not go amiss.”
The Prison Department guards might have challenged and surrounded an autogyro, and impounded an unauthorized boat. They had a healthy respect for a Multiplier skiff. They let it land between the huts and didn’t so much as give a dirty look to Susan, Lydia, and Mr. Orange. Matt, Volkov, and Salasso were easily enough spotted, strolling by the cliff at the far end of the small island.
Susan’s heart sank a little at their eager expressions. They had affected fatalism, but they must have placed a lot of hope in the arrival of the Bright Star Cultures. She gave them the news of Elizabeth’s unwavering decision.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Bitch,” said Matt.
“Bourgeois,” said Volkov. He made it sound a nastier epithet than Matt’s.
Salasso took it more stoically. “People change,” he said.
“Let’s find somewhere to sit down,” Susan said. “Mr. Orange has something to tell you. There’s a way out of this.”
There was a windbreak shelter with benches and a table, built by prisoners, a hundred meters away. As they headed for it Matt rushed off to the hut. He came back with a pot of coffee and some mugs. The Multiplier draped itself across the supports like a gibbon and leaned down, its speaking mouth forward, and delivered its usual wheezy breathless ramble. People, saurs, everybody who lived on planets, it explained, were influenced by the minds in those planets and formed attachments to them. Only space travel could break those attachments. In the long run many more people would travel in space and would lose their fear of the gods. To die for the sake of not fearing the gods was both superfluous and futile.
“We thought you knew,” said Mr. Orange.
The two men and the saur stared at Mr. Orange for a few moments.
“Fuck off,” said Matt at last. “What difference does it make, if the space-going people have a rational attitude and the others don’t? It’s the others who have decided to kill us, and I am not going to let them off that hook. Let them see the consequences of their actions and their beliefs. That’s what a public stoning is for! It’s not to deter the wicked, it’s to deter the righteous. You should know that, Susan. You were raised a gods-dammed Scoffer.”
“Well, I was not!” said Lydia. She slammed a fist on the table. “I was raised a good Stoic, and I became a Volkovist. No thanks to you, Grigory, but behind all your Communist claptrap there was something great. And there is still something great there, in the Space Defense cadre who still look up to you. And in the new traders, the Bright Star people, and the Multipliers. Between them they have the power to rescue you, not to run away and hide but to defy the world and all the superstitious gods-fearing bastards that live on it like nits in its hair.”
Volkov folded his arms. “And then what? Another revolution from above? I’ve lived through three already, two of them my fault. I’m not doing it again. Enough people have died here, and not only here. Enough.”
“Adding three more deaths won’t help,” said Susan.
Volkov snorted. “It’s not a question of what helps.”
Susan turned to Salasso. “You can see it, can’t you?” she pleaded. “You’ve tried to change minds, and now you know why you couldn’t. It’s not political, it’s not cultural, it’s a physical influence. You could—”
The saur’s sneer was thinner than the men’s, but no less scornful.
“Take my people on day trips to space?” His mouth stretched sideways a few millimeters. “Most of them are already in space, and no doubt on their way to fight the gods’ battles somewhere else.”
Susan felt herself shaking inside again, and tears escaping through that treacherous instability. She turned it to anger, and the anger away from herself.
“You can’t just sit here and wait to die!” she said. “What honor or defiance is there in that? It’s just the same wretched passivity you say you’re fighting against. Go away—come away! Join the Multiplier migration, join us. There’s no need to hide now, we’re here, and we’re going away.”
She did not know if she meant that. She was too various. It was the small offspring within her talking, just as her mother had feared. It was what her mother was fighting. She could almost sympathize; or rather, she could, and she could not.
“You might have a point,” said Matt, reluctantly. His voice sounded as if it was being dragged out with hooks. “I mean, why push it, if these people can’t change no matter what—”
The skiff came out of nowhere—not out of a jump, but out of an aerial manouevre so fast that its hull glowed red as it halted right beside them. The shock wave was still rocking the gazebo as a dozen heavily-armed men jumped out and surrounded them, plasma rifles leveled.
One of the men removed his helmet to reveal a pair of earphones, which he likewise removed.
“You were right, Lydia,” said Gaius Gonatus. “We’re still listening.”
The sun was in their eyes and they had disdained the offer of blindfolds. Susan was at the front of the crowd, with the other reporters. She could zoom her camera, zoom the mike, and watch and hear them all. It was only her concentration on this, her fierce determination that her draft of history would be the one to get through all the edits and be in all the books and tapes about the event, that kept her from weeping. That and the thought that weeping would be self-indulgent, because she was not mourning the two men and the saur. She would be weeping for the loss of her mother, who in clinging to her humanity had become inhumane.
The officer with three black cloths over his wrist was holding out two packets. “Hemp or tobacco?”
“I’ll go for a joint,” said Volkov.
“Let’s share it and a cigarette,” said Matt.
“All right.”
“I think I wish to die consciously,” said Salasso. “Hemp would tend to prevent that. Therefore, I will take a cigarette. I have on occasion wondered what their attraction is.”
“They’re bad for your health,” said Matt, predictably.
They accepted the officer’s offer of a light, and he returned to the squad. “You may address the public while you smoke,” he said.
Volkov and Matt glanced at each other. Matt shrugged and waved his cigarette. They swapped their smokes around.
“I wish I respected you all enough to despise you,” Volkov said to the outstretched microphones and to the world. “But you aren’t worth it. You have chosen to become part of an alien culture. That is your choice. What will you do when the next alien culture comes along, one which may be less easily adapted to? You will have to fight, as I taught you to fight. I hope I taught you well.”
He looked as though he was about to throw the diminished cigarette on the ground, but Matt reached out for it and passed him the hemp.
“Ah,” said Matt, exhaling gratefully, “there’s nothing like a butt for a roach. If you’re looking for words of wisdom from me, you can fucking forget it. I’ve had a good run and I have no complaints. Volkov was defending the human race according to his lights, and so was I. Come on, man, give Salasso that roach.”
“Thank you,” said Salasso, taking it and sucking hard. “The small quantity remaining should not affect my lucidity. Tell Bishlayan I love her, and tell Delavar I quite liked him, on the whole. As for most of the rest of my species, they have feared the gods, they feared the hominidae, and now they fear the Multipliers. I have shown that I feared none of them. I have killed a god, I have had friends among the hominidae, including Matt and including Elizabeth and Gregor, and when my blood runs out it will be full of Spiders.”
“Gods above, Salasso,” said Matt, “you never told—”
The rifles, as ever, had the last word.