He slowly worked his body around until he was lying on his side. A few feet away was the young black man, one of the men Pruit had been following. This black man was sitting on a large cushion on the floor. His hands were twitching slightly as he watched Adaiz, but otherwise, he was still. Next to this man, lying on the floor, were several weapons. Adaiz saw his own dirk and gun and four others. He turned his head more, and Pruit came into view.
She was lying on the rug facing him, tied just as he was. She had been stripped down to an undershirt and underwear. Her loose clothing, which had concealed the other weapons he saw, lay a few feet away. Her head was turned to one side, her cheek pressed against the floor, and she was still unconscious. This was the first time he had been so close to her since that morning by her pod. Now that he had been in human cities and seen the different shapes and colors of humanity, he could better appreciate how much he and Pruit resembled each other.
Adaiz stopped this train of thought. He had been thinking of her as an inanimate object. But, in a few minutes, Pruit would be waking up to the painful realization of her location. She would see Adaiz, and she would question him. He did not want that. Until he had the Eschless Funnel in hand, he would prefer she did not know of his presence.
He looked over at the black man again. The man glanced at Adaiz, then away, and Adaiz could see that there was something making the man uneasy. Adaiz tested the ropes on his hands again. They were tied tightly and wound around his wrists several times. He glanced at the pile of weapons, and a new resource occurred to him. On the left hip of his trousers was a clip to hold his dirk. This clip was sewn into a thick band that ran around the waistline of his pants. He was facing the black man, and his left hip was up. Slowly, he moved his hands and felt for the clip. It was still in place. He worked it backward so it would be out of the man’s sight. Then, with his fingers, he carefully pried off the clip’s rubber covering. The black man was now biting his fingernails with some nervousness and he paid no attention to Adaiz.
With the rubber off, Adaiz could feel the corrugated edges of the clip. Gently, he began to rub his ties against them.
Lying a few feet away, Pruit slowly became aware of pain. She could feel her cheek pushing into something rough and hard. At the back of her neck was a throbbing ache that seemed to course up into her head with hot bolts of electricity. She moaned as she came awake.
Her eyes opened, and she found herself looking across a floor at black legs folded beneath someone sitting nearby. She tried to concentrate, remembered then that she had been watching the Mechanic at a restaurant and had felt an impact from behind. Just as Adaiz had done, she tried to push herself up from the floor, only to find that she was bound tightly. She moved her eyes to survey what she could of the room. This small motion provoked a new burst of pain, and she let her eyes fall shut.
When she opened them again, she found the black man studying her.
“When is he getting back?” she asked.
The man shrugged and looked away. She could see that he was edgy. She ignored the pain and scanned the room. It was small and underfurnished, cushions and blankets on the floor, a few chairs here and there. There was a smell of garbage and decay coming from outside. There was dust on the shelves as though no one had been here in weeks.
She turned her head to the other side and found herself looking into the face of a young Kinley man, tied like she was and lying on the rug a few feet off.
He was awake and looked as though he had been conscious for some time. It shocked her for a moment, seeing a familiar face. It was like looking into a part of her life that was long past. Then she realized his face was not familiar, at least not in its particulars. It was only his coloring that she recognized.
Adaiz stared back at her, still working his hands gently and imperceptibly on the clip.
“Who…who are you?” she asked him in Soulene.
Adaiz pretended he didn’t understand.
“Who are you?” she asked again, her voice now clearer and more coherent.
Still, he did not answer her. With his wrists, he felt a slight lessening in the tension of the ropes as he managed to cut through a single strand.
“Who are you?” she asked again, this time in English. Why wouldn’t he answer? Was it possible he wasn’t Kinley? But he must be. Except for his shorter hair, she could have pulled him from the ranks of her Sentinel class.
Adaiz turned his head from her.
“Why won’t you answer me?” She had returned to Soulene. It was impossible that he did not understand. “Are you from a second mission? When did you arrive?”
Jean-Claude glanced at her as she began to speak in an unrecognizable tongue, but she was doing nothing of a threatening nature, and he soon let his eyes wander. His antidote had almost completely run its course, and he could feel the jumpiness that preceded deep craving. He stood from his cushion and began to pace.
Pruit glanced at the black man, then back to Adaiz.
“Answer me!” she said, her voice rising. Who was this man?
“You don’t know me,” Adaiz mumbled, his face still turned away. He said it in English.
“You’re Kinley,” she said in Soulene. “I know you are. Please…Tell me who you are.”
He turned to look at her and saw that her face was taking on a strained expression that must indicate frustration.
As he turned his head, Pruit noticed something odd in the way he moved. His motions were quick and smooth, and they seemed to start and stop very suddenly.
“You don’t know me,” he whispered to her in Soulene. He did not know why he switched to her language. It made no logic tactically, but something in him wanted to let her know that her senses did not deceive her.
Pruit recognized something in his face then, something almost out of a dream, his face leaning over her and the blue dome of Earth sky behind. “Yes I do,” she said. “I’ve seen you before.”
He did not answer.
“Talk to me!” she yelled.
“Keep quiet!” the black man hissed, stopping in his pacing to look over at her. He was biting his knuckles.
Pruit lowered her voice. “Please…”
“There is nothing to speak of,” he said softly. “We do not know each other.”
His Soulene was very good but not quite perfect, as though he had a slight speech impediment. No, she thought. That’s not it. Soulene is not his native language. Then who was he?
He turned his head away from her, and again, she noticed the way he moved, the sudden stopping and starting with no tapering off. He was either in motion or still, and there seemed to be no gradient between. It was unusual.
“Why won’t you talk?” she asked, her voice sounding desperate.
Still turned away from her, Adaiz said, “There is nothing to say.”
She heard it then. There was a lisp in his speech. He had tried to disguise it by whispering, but at last she had caught it. His motions, his lisp, they fit together. She felt a sick sensation in her stomach as understanding came to her. He was Kinley, but he was not Kinley. He was Lucien. He was one of their spies, trained in Kinley ways, but here, under the stress of captivity, his natural body language had given him away.
She looked at him, an odd mixture of rage and terror welling up within her. Her first thought was, This is a traitor, a human they have raised and who has willingly become one of them. Then her second thought was worse: The Lucien are here. They have followed me. They know that we know. And they know the purpose of this mission.
“I know what you are,” she breathed.
Adaiz caught the tone of her voice and turned to look at her.
“You’re one of them,” she said slowly. “You’re Lucien.”
Adaiz could see the look on her face, and he could feel the emotion it represented. She hated him, and the knowledge of that hate affected him deeply. She was the first human woman he had ever seen. He had carefully tucked her into her fullsuit so she would live; he had experienced p
leasure at touching her. He did not want her to know that he was her enemy.
He stared back at her and did not deny her accusation.
“Saving Father!” Pruit said, the rage coming to the surface. “You work for the destruction of your own race!”
He did not want to argue, for what could that accomplish? But Adaiz felt himself provoked to answer.
“The Lucien are my race,” he said. “They are my brothers and my family.” Why did he feel the urge to justify himself?
“Is that what they tell you so you will do their dirty work?”
“There is no ‘they!’” Adaiz said, his voice rising in anger and his lisp becoming stronger. “I am ‘they.’”
Pruit laughed unpleasantly. “How do they manage it? How do they make you such a loyal slave?”
“By Omani!” he yelled in Avani, then switched to Soulene. “I am Adaiz-Ari, of Warrior Clan and Clan Providence! I am a member of a race that seeks knowledge and brotherhood. There can be no slaves where there is enlightenment!”
“Enlightenment? For hundreds of years you’ve choked us! Blockaded us so we remain at your mercy!” In her anger, she moved her arms and legs and felt her ropes tighten.
“It is not a blockade,” Adaiz said slowly, anger now burning within him. “It is a quarantine.” He was still working on his ropes. He did not let emotion distract him from that track. He felt a second thread unravel in his bonds. “What kind of a race would kill every man and woman and child on a planet? What kind of a race would design a plague to do this and then release it? By the merest luck, we had our asteroid colonies, and some of us were able to survive.”
“What harm could we do you now? But, still, you are unsatisfied, and you want us gone—from your universe, from life itself!” Pruit’s eyes were burning, and she was yelling.
“Be quiet!” Jean-Claude yelled back at her. He was now searching through a cupboard, looking for the cubes of hashish he had left in the room. He did not know what effect they would have on him, but he hoped they would do something, anything, to allay the growing craving within him. Outside, it was twilight already, and still, the Mechanic had not returned. What if he had forgotten? What if Jean-Claude would be left all night without his drug?
“How can you even claim to be harmless?” Adaiz demanded, more quietly. “You have shown us what harm you can do. Infinite!”
“What would you expect us to do? You bombed our cities,” Pruit said. “You bombed us without discretion!”
“We never sought to annihilate your race! A planet can survive a bombing. Your plague wiped us clean!”
Pruit’s voice dropped to a deadly low tone. “Do you know how many of us survived your attack? Do you know how many healthy humans remained on Herrod after the bombing stopped?”
Adaiz did not answer her. He did not know.
“Fewer than one thousand.”
He said nothing, showed nothing on his face. But the number shocked him.
“Less than one thousand!” she hissed. “Did you ever wonder why we all look the same? Did you ever wonder why it took so very long for us to recover? Do you know what radiation does to the human body?”
Adaiz did not know the answer to these things. He was still recovering from the shock of her first revelation. Whatever he had imagined, it was a far greater number. Less than one thousand? Could that really be true? The Lucien had not known this. After the Plague, it had been a thousand years before they had any news of the Kinley. And they had always assumed that the humans were far less affected by the war than the Lucien had been.
“Ninety percent of survivors of the bombing died within the year,” she said. “Ninety percent! And ninety percent of those died in the next two years. And so on.”
Adaiz could not stop himself from asking, “How…how did you recover?”
“One doctor and a few others spent their lives taking genetic samples of five hundred survivors, the healthiest. Reproductive cells where possible, other cells if that was all they could obtain. He mapped out the recovery of the race by careful screening and incubated fetuses. It took more generations than we can count. So don’t preach to me about annihilation.”
Adaiz was shaken by her words. He had not known the extent of the damage on Herrod. “We have evolved to become a very different race than we were,” Adaiz said quietly. “We are more than warriors now.”
“And now, because you emerged first,” she continued, ignoring him, “you decide the future for us.”
“We must make our judgements,” Adaiz said. “Your population is growing faster than you can make room for it to live. This can only lead to a desire to colonize. In the near future, you will emerge as a space power—a colonizing space power. We cannot allow that, because we are your closest neighbors.”
“So you’ll wipe us clean.”
“You chose your path ages ago.”
“Do you know why our population continues to grow?” she asked, her voice soft. “Do you know what the half-life of plutonium is? Ten thousand years. We have no room, but we must grow. You know nothing of what we face. We have mutations, even now. They happen less and less frequently, but they happen. We still do not reproduce naturally. If you want a child, you will be impregnated by a healthy egg that has been fertilized with healthy sperm. It might be several hundred years old. Everything is screened, and still, there are mutations, even without leaks from the dome. That is how insidious radiation is. We have to expand our numbers until we have enough people with healthy genes to maintain the population naturally. We are still several generations from this, and until we achieve it, we are a race in name only.”
Adaiz suddenly saw the Plaguers as a race performing an elaborate balancing act, with the scales below them ready to tip one way or the other at any time. He struggled to regain the view of them he had held since childhood—a race barbaric enough to effect the destruction of another sentient race. The Lucien taught that their own ancestors bore much of the blame for the war and the Plague, but there was always the caveat that they, as a race, had changed, become more civilized, found religion in Omani and his gentler ways. For the first time, Adaiz thought that such a change might be possible for the Plaguers as well. Still, he clung to the wisdom of destroying Herrod. Lucien civilization was in a state of unprecedented prosperity, and it was in the best interests of the race to maintain full control over their home system. One’s own survival must come first.
“Just think,” Pruit continued, her words holding all the hatred that language could transmit, “if you had been born on Herrod, you might know these things and even feel concern for the future of your kind.”
Whatever sympathy Adaiz might have felt for her was killed by those words. “You are not my kind,” he said. “You will never leave here with the technology you seek. And your race will die.” He held her gaze for a moment, then turned his head away. Their discussion was over. A third strand of rope came loose, and he felt the whole grouping start to give.
Pruit let her head rest against the floor again. She felt spent. It took several moments for the anger to release her, but the pain finally brought her back to her current situation. She had not noticed her head as she argued with Adaiz, but now that they were quiet, the throbbing returned. She moved her attention to the black man. He was pacing by the window, something clutched tightly in his right hand. As she watched, he paused and opened his hand, looking at a small gummy cube of an amber shade. His other hand was clutching at his stomach. He appeared to be in pain.
Jean-Claude hesitated, then carefully set the cube of hashish in his mouth. He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes, savoring the taste. How many times had that flavor meant the coming of a beautiful drug fantasy? But now, as the cube began to dissolve, Jean-Claude only felt the craving within him growing stronger. He spat out the hashish, and his arms hugged his abdomen. Nothing would satisfy or even soothe him anymore, nothing but his own antidote. He let out a low moan.
Both of his captives were looking at hi
m now, but he didn’t care. Yes, he did care, he reminded himself, for he must watch them; he must watch them for the Mechanic. The Mechanic would be mad if something went wrong, and if he was mad, this craving would never stop; it would only grow stronger and then would come the convulsions, and they would eat him up, and if there was still no antidote, he would cramp up into a ball, and the pain would slowly kill him.
Watching the black man, Pruit saw his mounting panic. She had planned to wait without struggle for the Mechanic’s return. Surely he would question her and she would find a way to free herself and learn of his plans as well. But there was something wrong with the man. She watched him with her medically trained eye and realized he was experiencing withdrawal from something his body required. He had grown increasingly agitated, and now his digestive tract appeared to be cramping. There was, perhaps, opportunity here.
“He gives you something, doesn’t he?” she asked, intuitively deducing the Mechanic’s method of encouraging loyalty.
The young man’s head turned to her. His breathing was ragged, and now his fingernails were driving into his palm.
“He gives you something that keeps you with him.”
Slowly, he nodded. “Yes,” he whispered.
“How often do you need it?”
“Every day.” He paused. “More often would be better.” He was biting the inside of his bottom lip now. His throat was dry and beginning to feel sore.
“Is that how he trapped you?”
“Yes…” He twisted his neck in a gesture of pain.
Adaiz watched this conversation warily and continued his quiet escape plan. His hands were losing sensation, and the muscles of his forearms were aching, but he steadily rubbed the rope on the clasp. With the other two now occupied, he began to edge very slowly toward the pile of weapons.