Jo Clayton - Shadow of the Warmaster

“What?” Elmas Ofka came quietly to stand beside him. She stared up at the image. “What are we looking at?”

Another shift. Another mouse in the walls, this one painfully neat and weirder than the rat, he was walking through elaborate square corners, running a folded whiter-than-white cloth over every surface in his sparsely furnished lair, an irregular space created by the intersection of stressbeams and baffles, choosing the areas he dealt with according to a pattern in his miswired head.

“Discard,” Quale said. “Took the measure of life up here and took himself out of it.”

“Why are we looking at this?”

Lirrit Ofka came over, leaned against Elmas Ofka, arm curled loosely about her waist. “Yuk.”

The eyepoint was hovering over a nest of scavenger moles big as hunting cats, the young nosing blindly at the side of one while another heavily gravid female was regurgitating scraps of anonymous meat for half a dozen yearlings.

“Why are we looking at these things?”

Adelaar turned her head. “The Brain searched out lifeforms, Hanifa. We have to see them all before we know if one could be Parnalee.”

The eyepoint continued to jump. More moles, bats, mobile fungi, other, less-identifiable life forms, things mutated into half-glimpsed horrors.

“This is wasting time.”

“No,” Adelaar said, “we’re finding out where not to look for him.”

The large screen went blank, flipped back to the schematic of the Bridge.

“I was afraid of that, he’s in a blind spot somewhere.” She kicked the chair around, taped nervously at the arm. “Probably listening to us.”

“Listening?”

“Were it me in his place, I would be. At the least, listening.”

“So where is he?”

“I told you. A blind spot.”

“Get the others up here. We’ll do it our way, gridsearch this thing till we find him.”

“Fine. If you’ve got a year or two.”

“What?”

“How long would it take to search gul Inci room by room?”

Elmas Ofka frowned at the screen, one arm folded across her breasts, her fingers moving slowly up and down the biceps of her other arm. “Then how…?”

“Let me think about that awhile. And see if I can do something about snoops.”

“Ah.”

Adelaar crossed her legs, tapped her fingers on the arms of her chair. “The holding area for the prisoners is ready and Pels has set the tube to it. It’s near one of the lifepod banks so your people won’t have far to move them once you’re ready to pop the pods.”

Parnalee smiled, lifted his glass in a salute. “Clear them out, you oozy whore. Clear them all out, it’s woman’s proper work, cleaning house. Clear out yourself and leave me to fry.” He laughed. “It’s not going to happen, bitch.” He stroked his free hand along the smooth black flank of the interface. “Your time is coming, love. Wait a little longer, until they’ve licked up the vermin and I can move without running into strays.” He sipped at the brandy, his eyes on the lethal gray egg sitting on its mobile bed. “A little longer, love.”

The Bridge cleared quickly. Aslan watched the raiders swagger out, chivvying the Bridge crew before them. The weight of a helpless rage and inturning violence had been lifted from now that they had the Warmaster and she could no longer threaten their families and the land itself; should they happen across Parnalee, they’d tear him limb from limb, but it’d be (marginally) a more abstract action with overtones of justice, not simply the blood boiling up. There were small cruelties as they hustled their captives out, an elbow in the ribs, pinches on arms and buttocks; mostly though, they cut at the crew with a cheerful contempt, a facility of tongue developed to work off anger at wrongs that the law or force of arms couldn’t… no, wouldn’t right, the retaliation for the indifference of the Huvved Fehz to the suffering of the Hordar poor in the cities and on the grasslands, to the pain of Hordar families forced off the land they’d worked for centuries before the Huvved came and claimed it. She cross hatched an area of the pad, no words left, not right then; the Ridaar was flaking this, that was enough. Trouble ahead for everyone. These hill-and-grassers, they were what the Huvved had made them; when the war was over, when Elmas Ofka and those like her were trying to put the world together again, these raiders, bandits more than anything else, they were bound to be provoking, out of control, sources of instability, inviting a reimposition of the injustices that had created them. They had to change. She sighed. It wouldn’t happen. She looked at the crosshatching, a rambling nothing, started writing again, stopping, thinking, no longer noting impressions, being her father’s daughter for a change, poet’s daughter trying a poem of her own.

la le la la le la

yesterday be gone away

la le la la le la

games we play

words we say

la le la la le la

dead and done

dry bones in a drying pond

ripples pass beyond and gone

la le la la le la

echoes to relay replay

yesterday

la le la la le la

dessicated dull and dry

are you am I

are we today

nil and null

reclaiming sway

on and over

yesterday

la le la la le la

goodby lover

never hover

can’t recover

yesterday.

She sighed, dissatisfied, and pushed the pad away.

Jamber Fausse stood beside Quale, watching Adelaar and Pels hunched over their consoles. “There’s this woman I know,” he said, “had a kid, a boy. Time he was three he was taking things apart, see how they worked. Drove him near crazy when he couldna figure what did what ’n why. No one to school him, they were borderfolk, lived ’tween Chel and grass, family got broke up, the da, he was horned and headpriced, she took the boy down to Inci. He’s dead. Built him a yizzy ’fore he was nine. Bitbits got him, shot away the pods, poured his firejuice on him and lit a match. This Parnalee of yours, you say he wants to kill Huvveds?”

Quale smoothed his hand along his beard. “Yeh, but you wouldna like his methods.”

“Eh?”

“Why you think he wants this ship?”

“Since you be reading the man’s mind, you tell me.”

“Work the sums yourself, he’s after the hide of every Huvved on Tairanna and he doesn’t give a handful of hot shit for Hordar, not being Hordar or having any ties groundside. You doubt that, go look at your dead down in Sleepers. And he’s cracked to the marrow. Talk to Aslan, you want the book on that, have her read her bonebreaks and bruises for you. For that matter, ask the Hanifa what she thinks. Way she’s acting now, she got the point a time ago.”

“Point being don’t trust Outsiders?”

“Long as you use your head, not your gut.”

Jamber Fausse took a long look at him, then strolled across to Adelaar. “Yabass,” he said.

She started, looked round. “A minute. Let me finish this.”

He waited, hands clasped behind him, watching lines of symbol and number flicker in and out so fast no one who didn’t already know what they were could take them in. The schematic of the Bridge returned suddenly, the green lines overlaid with red. Adelaar contemplated them a moment, then looked over her shoulder, “What is it?”

“What’s this Parnalee know you don’t know?”

Quale frowned at the screen. “You’ve shut him out?”

“Right. He can’t hear us now.”